Sans Fig Leaf
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"Insert title here"
11 January, 2007
There's a syndicated columnist whose material I've wound up reading many times. Not because her column is that interesting, or the topics particularly compelling. Her best columns, in my opinion, barely rose to the level of mediocrity. Most of her stuff goes beyond lame into the category of "a criminal waste of bandwidth."
The reason I wind up reading her so much is her titles. The titles of her columns always sound wonderful and exciting and cool. And she's syndicated widely enough that I run into her work at multiple places. I'll see one of those intriguing titles and click on it. If I don't notice the author's name, I read through it and start wondering why the column seems to have nothing to do with the title. If I notice the author's name after clicking my heart will sink a bit, but I usually wind up reading it, anyway. I guess I keep hoping that one day one of her columns will actually live up to its title.
The one bright spot in this situation is that there have been at least two times that the gap between what the title promised and what the column was actually about was so vast, so infruriating, that I wound up writing an essay of my own on the topic that I had expected to read about.
I can't grouse too much about her writing. Since she's been getting paid to do this for some time, there must be enough readers out there who like her work to justify all these places carrying it. Though I have wondered, perversely, if the primary secret of her success are those titles. What if everyone's making the decision about whether to carry her based simply on the people who click on the titles? After all, is there any way to record whether people enjoyed reading a particular column?
All this was brought to mind recently when a reader of my site here asked about the title of a recent essay. I hadn't been very happy with the title, myself, but also hadn't been able to think of anything better. For a few days after that exchange I obsessed a bit over a better title. I never came up with one that fit that particular essay, though several other potentially interesting topics for future essays came to mind.
It got me thinking about the whole concept of titles, which led me to contemplate a couple of questions. Why do we use titles? What do we expect from titles?
The 'why' is so obvious some would say we can skip the question, but I'll give my answer anyway. We put titles on books, stories, shows, et al, as simple identifiers. It's a lot easier to ask, "Have you ever seen 'Phantom of the Opera?'" than to try to describe the show in a reasonable number of words. Which leads us to half of the answer to the next question.
We expect titles to be both descriptive and intriguing. Ideally the description will be accurate enough for a reader or viewer who has experienced the story or show to recall it later, and perhaps recommend it to others. Accurate doesn't necessarily mean comprehensive. An exhaustively descriptive title would make the essay itself superfluous (and would probably be too long to count as a title, anyway). Even without going to that extreme, it is possible to write a title that gives away too much, which makes the essay more than a bit of a let-down. On the other hand, the title shouldn't veer so far away from simple description to confuse the reader.
Titles are often allusions--references to (or partial quotations from) another work which the author hopes is at least somewhat familiar to the reader. Unfortunately, the more diverse the audience the less likely they will share a particular cultural reference. Even when a reader or viewer does recognize the reference, it may not evoke the image the author had in mind--which results in confused readers yet again.
Personally, I don't consciously think through all of this when I create a title for something I'm creating. Often a title that I like springs to mind early in the process and I just stick with it. Even if the title isn't fabulous, the story (or essay or whatever) should be interesting or rewarding on its own merits. "A rose, by any other name, would smell just as sweet," and all that, right?
Except that a title is also the first impression many readers or viewers will have of a particular piece. For a certain fraction of the audience, the title will be the first impression they have of the author. If you don't make a good first impression, it's unlikely the reader or viewer will look at the work itself. Which isn't always entirely fair, but many things in life aren't fair.
No matter how hard we work on creating that good first impression--whether we're talking about the title to an essay or something far more important--if the substance doesn't live up to expectations of that impression, we're not going to succeed in the long run.
For me, that means I'm going to continue to focus most of my energy on the end-product, so that the metaphorical rose really does smell sweet.
--Attributed to an unnamed English Professor
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