I was watching CBS Sunday Morning, and they had a segment on a book called Why Not Catch-21? The book discusses the origin for titles, and once I did a little research, I discovered there is weekly column in The Sunday Telegraph. The segment discussed the importance of titles. It's the first thing we notice about a paper, and it's usually the last thing that we deal with. I can't remember where I read this (Atwell? Moffett?), but the author suggested writing down 50 titles and then narrowing it down. The first twenty titles probably aren't very good. You really have to go beyond and dig deep for a great one. Occasionally, a great title might pop into our heads, but usually not.
I usually go back to my manuscript and look for key words, or I think about the main idea I want to get across to readers. Usually a great title has two parts with a colon, especially in college, right. So, the first part is the main idea and the second part after the colon goes into more detail. It's also great to insert humor or word play, if at all possible.
Let's look at some sample titles:
1. The Course of True Research Never Did Run Smoothly
2. Young Adult Literature
3. I-Search Paper
Which paper would you want to read? As teachers and readers of writing, titles will be very important. The first impression is the most important. All writing deserves a title, and hopefully a great title. We want to engage all of our readers.
In a mini-lesson, I would have student write down 30-50 titles for their paper. They will think it's impossible, but I would encourage them to just write and not worry about whether the titles were good or not. I might also lead them through how I would come up with a title. As an anticipatory set, I might share some of the stories from the book I linked to above. Does Catch-18 sound as good as Catch-22? Would either title be sufficient? You could also include in this mini-lesson information on punctuating titles. Think about how important the title was to the poem "The Kitchen Shears Speak." Titles and pictures on your blog posts are important as well. The blog posts are responses to the readings and experiences, but they are also writing assignments that ask you to write for an audience. Creating a great title is one way to get the audience's interest.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
When I am writing papers I never really think about the importance of the title. But a good title can really make or break a paper. Much like a good introduction students writing work needs to have good titles as well.
Matt,
Your comment made me think about Casey's, the teacher who came to our class, blog from a day or two ago.
Cut and paste this link:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?
blogID=6225463468066449410&postID=
9107846248558410186
ooops! I don't think I ever changed my title on my I-Search (and you even mentioned something about that last class period)! Sorry, I totally failed on that one.
Sorry about the boring title on much I-search, I know that totles are important but for some reason, I always seem to overlook them...
add me to the list of crappy i-search titles....
OH wow! I do recommend the thirty titles assignment...it seems with three...which is what I generally do, students come up with very similar titles. I'm doing that for their final. Thank you.
Also, a personal note about titles: a good title really puts ownership, often more so than the writing, which in turn becomes better, on the students. They really take pride in writing a good title.
Finally, Keri mentioned in the post looking back through the text to find titles. I agree. I encourage students to look toward the end of the paper, within any poems they've written about their topic, within any metaphors they've used in their writing, or within their most interesting or important section.
Wow! I thought my title was creative! Glad you did too! It seemed to be the only good thing about my paper!
Post a Comment