How To Write A Compelling Title
If you want an article, a story or any piece of published material you’ve written to attract more eyeballs, you need to create a compelling title. One, in particular, that will draw readers in due to some special quality it possesses.
What are those qualities? It varies, of course. Most compelling titles, however, tend to be either intriguing, catchy, provocative, interesting, amusing or some combination of those. In addition, they tend to be sufficiently informative regarding what the material is about.
Sometimes, you can come up with your compelling title before you even start the piece. You can’t rely on that kind of inspired brilliance day in and day out, though. Instead, most good titles are arrived at by some logical brainstorming that’s performed after the final draft is done.
When you’ve got your finished piece with all but the title missing, here are things you should do:
- Write down the main key words of the piece. Just write everything that jumps at you first — once you have a full list, you can work at finding one or two that are most prominent.
- Look at your organization and your arguments. Is there anything about either of them that stand out? If there is, can you capture its essence in one or two words?
- With the key words and the standout element now identified, you can then proceed to fashion a title that uses them. Remember the qualities we outlined earlier: intriguing, catchy, provocative, interesting and amusing. Make sure the title ends up falling under one or more of those items.