Anyone writing blogs or other articles may sometimes need to create a headline themselves. This should not be an afterthought or a last-minute task. It takes some careful consideration, and improves with practice. Consider carefully what to avoid and aim for in your headline.
In the history of the popular press, the task of writing headlines is so crucial that larger old-school paper-and-ink newspaper operations designated a specialist to create them. Even so, some headlines were total failures; think of “Dewey Defeats Truman”, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune, for factual inaccuracy, or “Missippi’s Literacy Program Shows Improvement”, attributed to the Associated Press, for failed proofing.
These days, with such vast numbers of people writing what are essentially news stories in blogs and websites online, the goal of selling the story has not changed, but the number of opportunities for messing up has increased significantly. Furthermore, the internet preserves idiocies and infelicitous phrasings indefinitely and embarrassingly. Even if there are no errors, headlines need to grab attention and encourage a specific behavior, so use all the tools and good practices available.
This means avoiding hackneyed words that add little. This also means being conscious of the four “U’s”: usefulness, uniqueness, ultra-specificity, and urgency.
Remember that most blogs are actually asking the reader to take action, whether that might be to:
- Purchase something,
- Call, write, or otherwise register an opinion
- Change personal behavior
The writer really needs to give the reader every reason to do so, without turning them off.
The following is a list of words that irritate this writer personally, with some thoughts on why this is the case. Others will have a different list, of course. Additionally, there are going to be situations where using any of these words is nearly unavoidable.
- Hurry: This is just irritating. Why did the blog, or article, not appear in enough time to make it possible to respond without hurrying? This suggests an artificially compressed schedule and can make the reader suspicious.
- Sale: These days, so many vendors seem to raise prices merely in order to lower them for what many consumers feel are fake discounts. Ensure that your article really will offer a true discount from the long-term price of the good or service you are promoting.
- Warning: Again, this vastly over-used word needs to be used with care. When applied to trivialities, it just makes readers angry.
- Solution: Don’t use this without appropriate supportive facts. When employed to describe the act of buying your product or service, especially without showing unequivocally that a real problem exists, and that what you are hawking will actually help, this word suggests that you are imposing on readers.
- Innovative: Be sure that you are using this word accurately. This is a word that should only be applied to something truly new. Otherwise, it makes the rest of the article seem untrustworthy.
- Best: Bloggers abuse this word with a very specific meaning at their peril. Use this only when you feel confident that your idea, consumable, or service fulfills you claim. Readers will be grateful if you use less grandiose terms.
- Top: This is another word that needs to be applied carefully. It is also a bit slangy. Just be cautious.
- Leading: A less specific word, this needs context to be meaningful to the reader. “Leading among who, or what?” the reader has a right to ask. Be sure that you indicate the population of companies, people, or items, that you are attesting yours leads.
- Announces: Some people are irritated by this. Announcements are often a pretext for bothering the reader with an email or a news release that is a thinly veiled advertisement. Find other ways to say this, if at all possible.
- Headline speak such as hit, flay, rap, hike, nix, nab, slate, as tempting as these super-short terms are for the 65 character limit.
Try, instead, to include other words that communicate the four “U’s”. You need to show the usefulness of what you are promoting. This means connecting it to the life situation of your specific readers. In order to get them to respond to your blog rather than any of many others, you want to find ways demonstrate that your product, service, or idea, is unique among other similar ones. Finally, you have the challenge of finding a way to across to your readers that the need to act is urgent, without the artificiality noted above.
So, if you have the responsibility of composing a headline, take it seriously and your articles will sell without alienating your readers.
Best, Top, Sale, Hurry, Announces, Leading, Solution, Innovative, Warning
The creation of headlines is such a specialized area of expertise in the old-school paper and ink journalism trade that many large papers had designated people to write them.
The research may still be underway on whether our attention spans are decreasing, but many moms and veteran classroom teachers have anecdotal evidence that this is happening. How can writers retain a grasp on this ever more elusive resource – a reader’s continued focus and interest? The techniques are not necessarily new, but they need to be applied with greater intensity and care in this age of instant gratification and non-stop clicking all over the web. Here are some tips that can help keep your readers eyes on your writing.
Be accurate:
If readers feel that you are saying something that is less than factual, and presenting it as fact, they will not spend their time on your piece. You can be certain that someone will make not of any inaccuracy, whether deliberate or not. There are so many ways now to cross-check the truth of your assertions that it is simply not worth it to prevaricate in a web posting.
You will be found out, and it will be embarrassing – both to you and to any client for whom you are writing. More importantly, your credibility in future postings will be affected. You could be dismissed as not worth the time to read what you have written. This is certainly no way to hold readers’ attention.
The solution is simple – do your homework! As a writer on the web, you have access to global information sources that should allow you to make truthful statements. If you are writing about something that is so secret that no sources exist, you need to give as much contextual information as you can to make your assertions credible. If the subject is so personal that no one else would know, again, be truthful. Keep fiction and non-fiction separate in your writing, and your readers will pay closer attention for longer.
Be useful:
Even if the sole utility of your piece will be to supply conversational fodder at the water cooler, your writing needs to serve the reader’s needs. Does it:
- inform,
- explain,
- solve a problem,
- offer insights,
- or provide material benefits?
While you are choosing topics (if you have this privilege), ask yourself why the reader should spend their limited resource of time on this article at all. If the answer is not obvious, then refine your topic or approach.
Be funny:
There is nothing like humor to keep people reading. Laughter is a universal solvent, removing barriers, disarming defenses, and retaining our attention. There is a plethora of inoffensive silliness around, but if you fear treading on toes, skewer yourself and your own foibles.
Be current:
If you can break a story yourself, no matter how trivial, take it!
Be timeless:
Alternatively, aim for classic and ageless wisdom. What will the reader remember over the long term? If you find something that will stick with them, your readers will stick with you.
Be provocative:
Raise a question that the reader can chew over, individually, or in conversation with others. Provide your own perspective, but invite the reader to go off and cogitate on this issue – after they have finished the article!
Be vivid:
Use the liveliest style allowable in the setting where your writing will appear. Choose active verbs to keep things moving. Use un-hackneyed descriptors, and as much detail as space allows, to awaken sensory images in your readers. The old advice is still valid – SHOW, DON’T TELL!
Be brief:
Don’t pad your writing with unnecessary, repetitive, duplicative, redundant and reiterative words – like these! Furthermore, don’t add silly phrases like, “isn’t that great?” unless so directed. Earn your pay from solid content and repeat orders, rather than empty writing.
Be a borrower, respectfully:
If you can find a quotation that expresses your idea better than you ever could yourself, don’t reinvent the wheel. Just be sure that you quote with correct attribution and paraphrasing if needed.
Be organized:
This should not need repetition but just in case, stick with the point laid out in your headline and in your introductory paragraph(s). If you start on one subject and end up in another, you will lose your readers along the winding and tortuous way. Misleading headlines waste the reader’s time with fruitless searches.
None of these are cutting edge, and none are rocket science. Thank goodness, however, in spite of technological advances, the human brain today still demands much the same things from a piece of writing that it always did. Apply these suggestions, and keep people glued to your text!
Famous authors have a great deal of good advice to give to aspiring writers. It often arises from their own experience of this challenging craft. Let’s consider some familiar suggestions from well-known literati. Under what circumstances did they come up with their good counsel for posterity? How does it reflect their own lives, and their work?
The speculative fiction author Ray Bradbury is quoted as saying, “Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.” Bradbury must have offered this comforting reassurance out of his own experience.
Born in 1923, he could never afford college, but he read daily in the local library and wrote constantly, with or without pay. He felt that he got an education from life. He personified the above quote entirely, by working from the age of 23, through his 80s. Over the decades he created short stories, books, movie and TV scripts, and even amusement ride designs and a pavilion at Disney’s Epcot Center. The Martian Chronicles introduces many youngsters to science fiction, and his short story A Sound of Thunder is in many school curricula.
He accomplished all this while raising a family and maintaining a marriage. His advice seems so prosaic coming from someone whose imagination transported the reader through space, time, and memory. Another quote, “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!” expresses the sense of excitement that Bradbury’s works spark in readers. The lucky readers of the fruits of his “hard, constant labor” often find themselves changed forever.
A very different perspective was provided by journalist, essayist, and novelist George Orwell. He bemoaned his observation that, “prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house”. He asserted that this kind of unclear writing was connected to unclear thought about vital issues.
He had personal experience as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and saw how populations could be manipulated into acting against their own best interests. He identified with democratic socialism but deplored Stalinism, most famously in his novel, Animal Farm. Later in Politics and the English Language, the same essay quoted above, he laid out a set of 6 questions and 6 rules to guide good writing, especially political writing. This literary legacy counsels brevity, simplicity, and originality
Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, researcher on the nature of the chemical bond, did not confine himself to one area of inquiry and action. Over his 93 year lifespan, he was a peace activist, and a famous proponent of micronutrients such as Vitamin C. He encountered resistance from the scientific community for some of his ideas, but he continued to write, to research, and to contribute all through his life.
This inspiring approach to creative endeavor is reflected in his assertion that, “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” To hear him speak in person in the 1970s was to witness this philosophy in action. He held forth extempore on a multiplicity of topics. His advice encourages beginning writers to remain unattached to any single notion, but to just keep churning out something new. He got a Nobel Prize for it, so it seems to have worked for him.
For those who feel that writing is a risky business, the following comment from Edna St. Vincent Millay is a mixture of comfort and warning: “A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down…If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him.”
This modern American poetess was a vivid character, pursuing fiery affairs on both sides of the gender line and a decidedly unconventional marriage. Fortunately, she continued to produce her highly personal poetry, dismissed for decades, partly out of sexism and partly because she had the temerity to use rhyme instead of blank verse. She is now considered a national treasure.
Look to these, and other famous authors, for good advice and ideas for your own writing!