Academic texts: a tale of two halves to the title

I have noticed a bit of a tendency when I write blog post titles.  They often seem to be in two halves.  My inner academic of old is not satisfied unless titles have that combination of word play and explanation.

If I am to complete this month of writing about reading, and what I’ve learned, it surely has to include reading academic works.  After all, you would hope you gained something from academic insights…

And I did.  I had the benefit of that great flexibility of the Scottish university system: two years to explore a range of subjects, two more years to focus down and complete a degree.  That means you can read a whole range of different things in that time.

Literature.  Ethnology.  Vocabulary.  Diagrams for cutting up sentences into useful bits.  Some stuff about how the brain processes things.  How to interpret dirt.  The physics of what frequency different sounds are at. A little bit of formal logic. I’m sure there was lots more.

At a distance now, with almost two decades gone since I began my undergraduate degree (no! already?), it can be harder to tell what I have retained from those studies.  As with school learning too, it seems to be less about individual facts or techniques, and more about attitudes, perspectives, and perhaps a few new skills along the way.

I learned the usefulness of reading a precis at the start of an article, to see if it would cover what I needed.  I learned how to reference things properly.  I learned (via Dan, actually) how useful subheadings are, to help you thread your way through a text, and to signpost where you’re up to.

But I did also learn the importance of those two parts to a title.  I don’t know where the convention started – but it is certainly well established in the arts and social sciences.

I wonder if it is a way of slightly apologising for one’s subject matter – or certainly, trying to make it more exciting by linking it to a more mainstream phrase.

It could also be about offering a new perspective on something familiar – which is hopefully a lot of what academic has to offer.  We start with what feels familiar, in the first half of the title, and we sketch out our approach in the second half.

In fact, with the title above, I’ve broken that rule – the word play is in the second half.  But then I’ve been applying academic title writing to blog posts, and only recently discovering that you need to reverse the process.

Blog posts titles need to start with the concrete, so that what you write has a greater chance of being found (out in the wilds of the interweb).  It does help if you have an interesting title too – people are more likely to click on it to read it.

So if I had called it 10 Top Tips for Writing Better Titles, that might have helped even further.  But I’m also writing what I like to write.  And read.  And I like a bit of wordplay, a bit of balance and rhythm, in my titles.

Those two halves have been needed this month, as I both name what is already out there (the book, the type of reading experience), and my take on it (the second half).  But next month? Who knows.  It may well be we’re back to something more like a conventional title.

Perhaps what I have retained – from all that reading at university – is the sense of creating a narrative to what you write.  Your Big Idea, your New Critique, will be easier to pick up if it has elements of writing that are already familiar to readers.

We want a shape to what we read.  A journey, a path, a sense of knowing where we’re heading.  We want to find ourselves somewhere which is new, and different.  We want to pat ourselves on the back, a bit, at recognising markers on the way – realising that someone else has been thinking about the same subject matter.

Those titles: they are part of the promise of the article.  The familiar, and the new.  And anchoring this new thing, this new writing, in parts of the world that are already known.  Giving permission to our insights, and hopefully adding them to this greater whole.

These titles can be a bold statement.  An enticement.  An opportunity for puns.  But they also signal a beginning – and one where we hope the road will be worth negotiating.