How to Title an Essay: Basic Instructions and Tips
It is not uncommon among students to underestimate the importance of titles. Many of them don’t bother to generate a good title for their essay and use non-specific titles like "Byron Lyrics" or "Modern Information Technologies." Why are they bad titles? Because they tell almost nothing about your work and don't raise its primary purpose!
What is a title for an essay? It is a brief reflection of the essay content that should perform the following functions:
- predicts the content (by informing about the topic);
- prepare readers to perceive it in a certain way (depends on the type of your essay);
- excite readers’ interest (feel certain that your tutor don’t like giving As for boring papers);
- contains keywords (makes sense for those students who want their works to be accessible through a computer search).
Good titles for essays should meet these requirements, helping readers take well to your work while assisting you in getting high marks. Thus, you need specific and meaningful titles, yet quite brief and catchy. It can be a challenging task, especially when you are not a pro in generating headlines. Let’s find out how to title an essay so that your title could add to your academic performance.
How to Write a Title for an Essay: Steps to Take
Some students make a mistake when trying to create a great title prior to writing their paper. Yes, in some cases you can begin with writing a good title, but this works fine only for those students, who are quite sure what and how they are going to write. Moreover, there are times when a catchy title jumps out on a student - when the student has a clear understanding of the topic under study. However, when you have a faint idea of the would-be content of your paper, how can you reflect it in your title? As a result, students often rewrite their essays several times, changing their thesis statements and titles each time, until they feel totally exhausted.
Try another approach. Start with drafting your essay, and when the task is completed, revise the results. It is highly likely that you would like to change something in your draft, while during revising and proofreading you can stumble across your title. When reading your draft, focus on your central statement, major arguments and ideas – they can inspire you to generate a great title.
Write down a couple of ideas on your title derived from the main points and think of the audience that will read your paper. You can choose formal or informal language depending on the audience, as well as certain clichés, easily recognizable by specific groups of people.
If this doesn’t help, think of how to make a good title based on the purpose or other peculiarities required by the type of your essay. For example, when preparing a persuasive essay, you can use emotional words to get your audience prepared and intrigued, while in problem solution paper the solution offered can become a focal point of your title. Also, consider both affirmative and interrogative sentences – you can come up with a title in the form of a question, and your conclusions made in the essay will be the answers.
Finally, think about quotes. Sure, there are some quotes in your essay or materials on the topic you read, and some of them can hit the mark describing the content of your essay perfectly.
Essay Title Ideas and Tips - Easy and Helpful
To better understand what you should work toward, check our good title ideas for an essay on discussable subjects:
Business
- Low-value strategies to make small business grow.
- Starting a business with no investment: myth or fact?
- How online technology has been changing retail
- Why does business culture matter for company development?
- Supply chains: comparing Business to Business and Business to Consumer schemes.
Society
- Today’s implicit bias that drives racial harassment.
- Is the institution of marriage still alive?
- Fake news: Identify and Avoid
- How living in a megalopolis challenges an individual.
- The irony of McDonaldization.
Through understanding how to title an essay you can both get better marks and gain useful skills to generate ideas.