They can be difficult, confusing and wrong: headlines

By Taylor Freret

“Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant”

Confusing!

“If Strike isn’t Settled Quickly, It May Last a While”

Really?

“All options including strikes in Pakistan open to combat al Qaeda: U.S.”

Boring and long…

Headlines can determine whether or not a reader picks up a paper. Few people want to read an article whose headline is a command, boring or just a plain, obvious statement. And yet, that seems to describe several headlines in today’s newspapers, cherub instructor Rachel Stults said.

But it doesn’t have to describe tomorrow’s newspapers. Stults, along with instructor Mary Lou Song, made it their mission to teach the cherubs how to write headlines.

“The trick to good headline writing is keeping it short and using active verbs,” Song said.

That may sound simple, but for some cherubs, it was quite the opposite.

“The workshop made me aware how hard it is to write a good headline,” said Sarah Nolen, a cherub from Pittsburgh. “I would never want to be a headline writer. Never.”

“Being able to write headlines is a gift,” said Charlotte Ryan, a cherub from London. “Headlines are almost as important as the lead.”
           
According to Song, headlines are often even more important.
           
“You get three words to communicate an entire story,” Song said. “Sometimes a headline is all you get to interest the reader. To be able to do that is part art, part science.”

“Headlines have the power to bring the reader in or not,” Stults said. “It takes a really talented journalist to write headlines that are clever but not cliché, accurate but not dull.”

Song and Stults’ workshop went over the finer points of headline writing. For example, summarize the news quickly but do not steal the lead. Use active voice and S-V-O (subject-verb-object) structure. Make sure the tone of the headline fits the tone of the article.

“And always think with a dirty mind,” Nolen said. “You have to be careful how headlines will be interpreted.”

The workshop included a section where cherub groups were presented with real articles without headlines. Each group came up with its own creative one.

For example, one article described a marketing problem of “Ratatouille,” a movie about a rat who longs to become a chef. One group came up with the headline, “Ratatouille cooks up marketing problem.”

Coming up with headlines was Ryan’s favorite part.
             
“We had to think about which headline would be the best and then compare it to the one that was actually given,” she said. “In a lot of cases, I thought ours were actually better.”

Others felt that the creativity angle was sometimes overdone.

“The headlines were creative, but a lot of times they were so specific it was hard to even understand their meaning,” said Alexandra Wildenhaus, a cherub from Ottawa, Ohio.
           
Despite the difficulty of writing headlines, the workshop was certainly helpful, said Sydney Schuit, a cherub from West Hills, Calif.
           
“Writing headlines can be challenging,” she said. “But I feel much more confident now. The instructors really know their stuff.”