How to Find a Effective Title for Your Paper
Surfing around the web this week I was thinking a lot about title paper (some issue in my topic) and I found an interesting article that talked about how to write catchy title for your paper. It was rather informative and made me realize how title paper is in fact important and worthy of attention.
I’ve pasted important points of this article below for you to check out yourself. Just make sure when you’re done, you come back up and check out this link.
Suggestions for choosing a catchy title for your essay:
Steps:
- Write your essay. It is very difficult to sum up what the essay is all about unless you’ve already written it.
- Determine your audience. You should have done this when you wrote your essay, but think about your audience again when deciding on a title. Your title may change depending on the audience.
- After you have determined your audience, imagine yourself as one of them. What would draw you to read your essay? Good content? Humour? Pick a few things your audience looks for in an essay.
- Reflect the things the audience looks for in the title.
- Re-read your essay and see if any good titles come to mind. If you find anything, you are finished. If you don’t, move on to the next step.
- Try picking a few key words of your essay topic and entering them into a quotations search website like Bartlett’s quotations. You may find a relevant quote. If you do, pick a fragment of it and use it as your title.
- Do any television shows or songs come to mind when you think about your essay? If so, try imitating the TV show title or select a phrase from the song to use as your title.
- Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Determine what is appropriate for the title.
Tips:
- Your title should relate to your topic.
- Don’t use many words. If you can sum up your topic in 4 words as opposed to 6, pick the 4 word option. However, don’t sacrifice that perfect catchy title just because there is a shorter, more boring option.
- Try not to use too much scientific language. “The lifespan of a South American tree frog” may be more specific, but it is much less catchy than “It’s a frog’s life”
- Try to be enthusiastic about your topic. If you are enthusiastic, that will show through your title and your whole essay.
- Don’t be afraid to use a sub-title. If you have a catchy title, but fear it doesn’t give enough information, use it anyway but clarify using a sub .
- If you are writing a formal research paper, make the title as informative as possible, even if seems a bit wordy.
- To spice up a boring title, put a catchy phrase or quote first, colon, title. Example: “The Stronger Sex?: A Comparision between the Roles of Women in The Metamorphosis and The Stranger“