Part 1 of this essay (
The craft of writing headlines and titles - 2), I started a discussion on the headline-writing craft after taking up this perplexing grammar question by a Forum member: “May I just ask if there is really no need to put the conjunction ‘while’ in this news headline from the CNN Philippines website: ‘Lightning kills two men playing mobile games on a mountain’?” I explained that grammatically, there was no need for “while” in that headline because it would have just created the misleading sense that it wasn’t the two men but the mountain that was playing mobile games when lightning struck: “Lightning kills two men
while playing mobile games on a mountain.”
The CNN Philippines news story though made the right choice of not using “while” in that headline, methodically following these norms: use a strong action verb in the active voice in the “historical present” (“kills”) to convey a sense of immediacy, then drop articles (“a,” “an,” “the”) and nonessential words (like place and time of occurrence). I then suggested making that headline totally article-free by doing this reconstruction: “Two men playing mobile games on mountain killed by lightning.”
Such headlines play it straight by just summarizing the news, but it would be remiss of me to create and leave the wrong impression that headline writing as a craft is all that simple. In fact, journalism, publishing, and all forms of media communication today require headlines and titles that don’t just deliver accurate and reliable information but grab attention and resonate, able to strike an emotional chord with the reader or listener. This makes writing such headlines a major creative effort and an entire discipline by itself.
As the craft is so broad, so diverse, and so industry-specific, I won’t attempt to go into the detailed how-tos of feature headline writing here. All I’ll do is to give a few broad strokes to give a clear idea of the kind of language that English feature headlines use and to make those interested in learning the craft aware that a vast amount of literature about them is already available in print and on the web.*
IMAGE CREDIT: GETRESPONSE.COMHOW WELL DOES YOUR FEATURE HEADLINE MEASURE UP TO THESE
YARDSTICKS, PRETTY MUCH OR FAR OFF?"
To begin with, I’m offering as samples eight feature headlines that I myself have used for my English-usage Forum articles (for a better feel, imagine all of them in the typical two-deck format): “To survive, democracy needs to find a way to break its confidence trap.” “Our personal destiny may already be hard-wired into our brain.” “To face life’s tough challenges, do we need fairy tales more than ever?” “Romancing the English alphabet, both literally and figuratively.” “Belief without evidence to support it is always morally wrong.” “The real wonder is that humans ever discovered science at all.” “When you really don’t have anything to say but simply need to say it well.” And, well, “Do kingfishers eat butter?”**
The eight feature headlines above are all fashioned in a cadenced literary mold rather than in the staccato straight-news style. Each is crafted to capture the essence of the feature story being introduced, as much as possible using grammatically complete sentences. This is in contrast to straight news headlines like that of the CNN Philippines story that we’ve taken up; to fit the format and space constraints of news headlines, they need to be stripped of their articles and nonessential elements and purposely made to sound telegraphic.
Indeed, the typical run of modern-day feature headlines are—as one blogger on the web describes it—in the form of “new or creative variations of clichés, titles of literary classics, creative puns, twists of ad slogans, and well-known sayings.” In the teeming marketplace of information and ideas served by fiercely competing traditional and social media these days, such catchy headlines are definitely a must to capture our attention just to begin with.
(Next:
The rightful place for a headline modifier) July 25, 2019
This essay, 1,153rd of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the July 18, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times
, © 2019 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.----------------------------
*VERY INSTRUCTIVE RELATED READING:
Kerry Butters’ “5 Tools And Tips For Creating The Perfect Headline”**For a better appreciation of how these eight feature story headlines/titles capture and reflect the essence and themes of their respective stories, I invite serious students of the headlining craft to read those stories by clicking these links:
1. “To survive, democracy needs to find a way to break its confidence trap”
2. “Our personal destiny may already be hard-wired into our brain”
3. “To face life’s tough challenges, do we need fairy tales more than ever?”
4. “Romancing the English alphabet, both literally and figuratively”
5. “Belief without evidence to support it is always morally wrong”
6. “The real wonder is that humans ever discovered science at all”
7. “When you really don’t have anything to say but simply need to say it well”
8. “Do kingfishers eat butter?”
