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How to Title an Essay: Tips and Examples of Creative and Clever Titles

How to Title an Essay: Tips and Examples of Creative and Clever Titles

Published by on 2021-06-29 20:03:50

Why do smart and creative essay titles matter? Actually, that is simple to explain and easy to understand. Let’s find out the reason for headlines to be so important and then define the way to craft a worthy, suitable, and right essay title that fulfills its function effectively.

For starters, think about the following: have you ever tried to “disassemble” headlines of newspaper articles or those on the web? The Internet example suits the situation even better because it is the title of some content (regardless if it is a video, a news article, a blog post, a social media one, etc.) that defines whether or not you are going to open and check it. At the same time, the first page of any newspaper or magazine containing the most exciting headline printed on it has been remaining the main sales instrument for periodicals throughout decades. You understand the deal, don’t you?

The title of your essay is something that “tunes” the reader (in college – it’s your professor, further – the target audience of your writings) to the right way. That line has vital meaning for the content of an essay and can directly define the effectiveness and result that your ideas, analytics, arguments, and explanations bring later.

As you might understand from the title of this article, here you’ll find out more about essay headlines, their meaning, principles of generating clever ones, and the meaning of creativity for tying things together. In fact, the guide below is universal: it will suit titling short and long essays, scientific articles, blog posts and longreads, fictional books, and maybe even movies.

How to Title an Essay Well and Why Headlines Are Vital

The first thing for you to understand here is that the title is your first line of attack when it comes to attracting someone’s interest and making them pay attention to your paper. That engagement should be the focal point. A perfect title intrigues the reader or professor, so they have positive expectations about the contents of your essay, research paper, or anything else.

Of course, the shape and message you pack in your title depend a lot on the paper’s type. For example, the name of a random essay reflects the idea and message it carries while involving the emotional, impressive aspect sometimes. In turn, titles of research papers must be dry: concise, straightforward, stating problems and/or solutions, or supporting some statements in a clearly visible way.

Good Titles for Essays: What to Pay Attention To?

The skill of crafting suitable and effective essay titles is a must-have element of every good student’s portfolio. To begin with that, you should know more about the process itself and the features that define a worthy paper name.

The process of creating a solid essay headline is similar to that of a random idea or even paper outline. You start by coming up with as many ideas as you can generate. In short, you take into account the topic and the contents of your writing and then brainstorm potentially suitable titles.

Once again, the goal here is to make the reader think something like, “This is worth reading attentively”. Therefore, a title is the first hook. So, it can’t serve only the purposes of, dare to say it, marketing only. A good title is informative because the professor or the reader should have a clear idea of what they are going to see further in the paper to decide whether they will read it with involvement or just look it through quickly and carelessly.

How to come up with interesting titles for essays all the time? Don’t forget about the word count. In general, the shorter the headline is, the better it looks. However, if you need to extend the length of your essay’s name to add more clearance, you might want to do it for sure.

Either before or after your brainstorming, you should also apply the key aspects of a worthy and effective title to your one. So, here is the checklist. Your essay title is perfect if it:

  • catches the professor’s attention – you have read about that far more than once in the text above, and it is still worth repeating. Do not bore with the title by oversimplifying it. A bit of creativity can blend even the most formal language perfectly;
  • is possible to believe in – that’s the other side of catchiness. A lot of high school, college, and even university students concentrate on hooking people up with their headlines so much they add unreal details to them. That move blurs or even perverts the intentional meaning of the title and may end up with the professor feeling tricked. They won’t give your paper a worthy grade if its title does not correlate with the content;
  • is perfectly readable – consider that attentively. Do you like reading titles that make you feel your brain is about to feel pain despite it physically can’t? Your prof doesn’t as well. Make sure you don’t make it too complex, full of jargon expressions and tricky constructions;
  • uses an active voice – it is more preferable than the passive one in any case. If your essay’s name contains passive voice verbs, you might want to rephrase it the opposite way;
  • is brief – too extended titles confuse. Period;
  • is accurate – no matter what your subject, field, or topic is, accuracy is the priority for any essay title.

Some additional recommendations on how to make a good essay title come next. Take them into account to make your paper’s headline as close to excellence as possible. Those include:

  • coming up with titles for each section. Yes, title paragraphs. It can be just an exercise to train your skill of titling or an original way to add some more structure and clearance to that paper;
  • making the title be the essay’s summary. While keeping that in mind, you’ll keep your ideas on track more confidently;
  • taking care of title capitalization attentively. This may vary depending on the requirements, formatting styles, and instructions stated by your professor. Generally, they capitalize the first letters of each word but those of prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and pronouns;
  • using proper font formats. It is better not to underline the headline of your essay. Regarding that the title is usually using bold fonts, underlining may spoil an impression and make the professor think you are overemphasizing the topic. The best option is to choose one of two options: if the formatting requirements want you to bold the title, then underlining it is not necessary, and vice versa;
  • revising the final title draft. Just like you proofread and edit the finished paper, you should do with its headline. Is it catchy and informative enough? Does it stick to the topic and the main idea? If necessary, ask your friends to read it and make suggestions. Check spelling, grammar, orthography, and other likely aspects attentively to avoid basic errors and typos, too;
  • using colons properly. Punctuation rules work here as anywhere else. In case you’ve got two topics and want to use them both to inform and interest your professor, use a regular colon, not a period, to distinguish them.

Now, when you’ve got a lot of information on titles separately, it is time to dive into the process in more detail. Below, you can find some professional recommendations, as well as headline examples to use as references. It’s always better to have a map showing the way instead of simply going in blind, isn’t it?

How to Come up With a Good Essay Title: Advanced Instruction & Some Examples

When thinking about how to write a good title for an essay, and regarding the recommendations described above, one may feel it’s too difficult. On the one hand, a worthy paper headline should be informative. On the other hand, it shouldn’t be too wordy. Then, the catchiness comes into controversy with preciseness. The trustworthiness seems to have not too much in common with intriguing. Is it actually that challenging to title an essay?  

No, it isn’t. Generating a proper headline won’t be challenging if you do everything right. The recommendations below will let you come up with the plan, stick to it, and connect the title with the essay’s contents perfectly.

Write Your Essay

A title is not your starting point when it comes to any writing. That rule is even more relevant for academic papers. The fact that you come up with the heading without knowing what your essay would look like for sure will only harm the paper’s overall quality. The way you go should be directly opposite.

Do not base your essay on a title but come up with a title after you finished an essay itself. That’s how you will know what to underline and message to the professor in your title. It would be even better for you to read the final draft of your untitled paper a couple of times to have a reasonable basis for your concept brainstorming.

Additionally, an attempt to come up with a title before even starting a paper itself will make the whole process a lot more challenging. Think about that: in addition to spending a lot of time to come up with a headline from scratch, you put certain frames for your research and writing at a time. Why should you limit yourself with the borders of that title beforehand?  

What’s the Essay’s Topic and Style?

That should be reflected in a title, and that is the reason why you should have an essay ready before naming it. What is the topic you are exploring and describing in your essay? Is it an informative academic writing assignment or a free essay (for example, a narrative one)? It is vital to analyze these points.

In case the focus point of your essay is on a topic like “guerilla wars’ tactics with examples”, then there is no way to put humor in a title. A straightforward, truly academic format is your choice.

On the other hand, if you write about “the factors behind the TikTok popularity”, some humor will cut it quite well. Know the mood of the paper and make the title keep up with it. That’s your way to success with naming an assignment.

Here are some moods (aka tones) of the essay with topic examples:

  • serious: “The Consequences of World War II”;
  • informative: “Ten Principles of Network Safety”;
  • persuasive: “Why It is Critical for Modern People to Develop Communicative Abilities”;
  • funny: “The Ways Your Cat Loves You”;
  • friendly: “Ways to Cope with Bad Mood”.

Those are not all but the most widespread moods. Feel free to come up with your toning if you know how to reflect it in a title correctly. It will be great if it suits the format and the topic of the paper.

Keep It Short and Simple

Again, when you are busy composing a headline, don’t forget what goal it is called to serve. First of all, it names your paper. The key to the right titling is the understanding of that purpose and the ability to keep the proper balance between various aspects described above.

For example, you should not try to tell the topic A to Z with a single title line. Don’t go in with unnecessary and pointless details. You’ve got a couple of words to sum up the content of your assignment. So, focus on what you find the most critical and wrap it up in a single, straightforward, and short message.  

Here is one more tip: pay attention to the essay’s thesis statement. It is difficult to come up with a better title reference because nothing else contains the very essence of the paper. So, cutting your thesis statement to the size of not more than four words can help. Think of yourself as a journalist creating a first-page headline for the bestselling newspaper or a marketing specialist about to come up with a sniper-shot slogan for a company like Ford, Tesla, or Apple. That’ll do.

Relevance Is Crucial

A relevant title is an effective one. There is no room for fancy expressions, tricky metaphors, acronyms, or jargon. Come up with a couple of keywords, connect them together to make sense, and make sure the final phrase reflects the concept of your paper. That’s it.

Involve a Little Bit of SEO

Anyone can get catchy titles for essays with the use of SEO principles. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which means adjusting the content of website pages according to the ways how visitors type Google requests.

Here, you might want to determine your paper’s main keywords (2-3 words describing the topic the most) and ask Google about some topic references or quotes. That’s how you can check other creative titles of close papers and use those concepts to come up with your original essay name.

Which Title Is Good or Bad?

Simply put, a bad paper title does not let the reader understand the point of an essay. Mostly, a wrongly built essay title is not specific enough. It’s too general. That is why it’s not complete.

Turning your title into a more trustworthy and informative one  is possible after you add key info and a more precise, thorough structure to it. The very best heading is the essence of an academic paper packed and wrapped with the use of only several words. Crafting an effective and suitable title requires a student to take their paper’s content and structure into account.

Mistakes Not to Make When Coming up With Essay Title Examples

To make it easier to perceive, here is the list of things to avoid when you are about to craft your original paper heading. So, do not:

  • come up with immorality, lack of ethics, touching sensitive problems, use of negative topics;
  • bring your bad experience to the public space. It’s the part of your past, and maybe your personality, but it shouldn’t become the element of your papers;
  • pose incorrect questions. Keep in mind one simple thing: if you can’t pose the questions correlating with your main study subject, you most probably pick the unsuitable topic;
  • make it too private. It was said above that the bad experience you had in the past is yours only. There is no way to show it in any academic paper you write;
  • ignore the professor’s guidelines. That’s the mistake many students tend to make unwillingly and accidentally. It won’t take you too long to clarify the requirements once more to make sure you understood them correctly and fully. Do that, and your paper will be much better, and so will be its title. 

Keep up with the recommendations above, and you’ll come up with great titles for academic papers. And, of course, don’t forget that you can always request professional assistance whenever you feel the need for it.