I will first have a title that is too general, or a little bit facetious, like "The one about Lorca as musical intellectual." I wouldn't keep that as the title, of course. I had the working title the "Approaches to 'Lorca and Music'" for one article. It gives me an idea of what it's "about" without much fuss.
Then comes the crafting of the title. It shouldn't be excessively long. Well under twenty words. It is fine to be formulaic here. I don't like parentheses in titles, too "1980s," the "(Un)masking the ____ " . The colon is a good device to link two parts of title.
The title is the beginning of your rhetorical contact with the reader. It should convey information about what kind of scholar you are and your attitude toward the subject matter. I like some of Andrew Gelman's titles, like "I Love this Paper but it's barely been Noticed" or "Statistics as Squid Ink: How Prominent Researchers Get Away with Misrepresenting Data." It makes me want to read the article, even though it's not in my field and I wouldn't understand it. Sometimes the title is great and the article or book turns out ho-hum. That's a different problem.
I used to make fun of titles like "Structure, Theme, and Style in ...." That's telling the reader you can't be bothered to work on your title for at least a few minutes. On the other hand, a title so clever or opaque that it conceals the subject isn't good either. Sometimes I come back to directness: "Lorca as Musical Intellectual."
What are some of your favorite titles?
3 comments:
I like “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction”, which has something about it that seems slighly contradictory. It also really captures what the essay is about.
I have also always admired the first part of “Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo”, but its second part is a bit too flat (“analysis of concepts”: I should hope so).
I don't like the four abstract nouns.
With the Benjamin title, in the English translation they usually leave out the possessive.
I haven’t read the Benjamin in English in a long time, so I had forgotten that (and hadn’t noticed the elision of the possessive in the translated title). That elision does lose a nuance of B’s title, but it’s perhaps not that important.
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