Titles are Hard

Before 20.109, my writing experience had almost exclusively been in writing essays, book summaries, stories, and similar types of papers. Every writing assignment I’d had previously had exclusively focused on the content of the essay itself. I had never had any written assignment where the title of the paper was even slightly considered as part of the grade. I guess it’s a pretty small component of the work we’ve done in 20.109, but it’s one that I’ve found to be particularly interesting. Coming in to the class, I had anticipated much of the lab work and the types of writing we’ve done, but I had never considered putting so much thought into creating a title. It’s an interesting and completely new idea to me – having to basically “market” my work to a target audience.

As interesting as I find this component of the data summary and the figures we’ve created or edited so far, it’s not easy or intuitive to me. I have a hard time summarizing an entire paper, and making people actually interested in reading the paper in full – in about one sentence worth of words. I had enough trouble titling figures on individual homework assignments, so working with Hunter to come up with a title for our data summary was certainly time consuming. We spent a good chunk of time coming up with the first sentences that came to our minds that would at least sort of summarize our data summary. Eventually, we found one that we were fairly satisfied with, and wrote it down. Then came the stage where we practically needed to analyze the title one word at a time, making sure the title made clear everything we wanted to promote about the paper, but was not overwhelming or cluttered. We finally came up with something we thought summed up the main points of the paper, and submitted the data summary draft.

Okay, so that was done, right? Nope. A week or so later we started round two: the revision. After we finished revising everything else, it was time to tackle the title. We started by looking at our previous title: Was this part here too specific? Maybe the wording over there wasn’t specific enough. How can we change this phrasing?

At first, we continued our same strategy of going through the title, word by word, and making tiny changes. After a while, the title had changed very little, and we realized we needed a new approach. It was time to write a new title, completely from scratch. We started differently this time though. This time, we started by writing a massive sentence that described everything we could possibly consider including in our title. Next, we narrowed down what information was absolutely crucial to understanding the purpose of the paper. We reviewed several points: Which parts of this current title are interesting to our target audiences? Does this part of the sentence give the absolutely necessary details of our experiment? Does our title show readers why our results are impactful or significant? After that, we removed all unnecessary words and phrases. Done.

This process was significantly faster than our previous method, and I felt that I had a much clearer reasoning for why we wrote the title exactly as we had, and why it would make the paper seem intriguing to our parties of interest. I learned what works for me in terms of creating a title by trying another, less effective, method first.

Writing the title isn’t the only part of the data summary we needed to consider extensively. The abstract presents another, possibly more difficult, challenge for me. Unlike the title, we needed to include a bit more than the bare minimum to know what the paper discusses, but we needed to avoid virtually rewriting the paper within the abstract. This balance was difficult for me to work out, but I personally found more success when I went through and considered how each individual sentence contributed to the goal of the abstract.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that 20.109 has helped me learn to evaluate what information is crucial to gain the attention of the intended audience, and what information is excessive. And I’m glad I learned by trying different methods, and struggling.