Why writers should be careful of their headlines
While doing my usual rounds of monitoring, mine eyes happened upon the headline in Inquirer.net for a story on the situation in Nigeria. It caught my attention because of the way it was constructed:
“Filipino seaman dies in Nigeria attack; 18 others due Friday.”
Ok. If you read it hard enough, you’ll come to understand what the title is saying. Indeed, the lead paragraph focuses more on the topic after the semi-colon than the first, more attention-grabbing one.
Still, one of the principles drilled into your mind during journ and writing class is the need to compress essential ideas in both the headline and the lead paragraph. This is because of the well-known adage that not everyone has a CEO’s luxury of poring through the morning paper for the whole of the morning. Your average man-off-the-street probably has enough time to read only a few articles in full. Most will simply skim the collection of writeups by looking at the headline and the lead paragraph. Most times, they will only read an article in its entirety if that writeup is (a) interesting and, (b) interests them.
Given that context, it behooves people in the profession of journalism to not only make headers that jive with their leads (at least), but make sense given the article it precedes. In fact, from what I understand and underwent in all my journ and writing classes in college, the proficiency in making a good and appropriate header is part and parcel of good journalism.
Heh. If I was the journ prof of the person who wrote that article on Nigeria – hell, if I was his editor – I’d fail the article then and there. Because the whole header sends the wrong message to the receiver. Oh, sure, I understand what was meant, but… just look at it:
“Filipino seaman dies in Nigeria attack; 18 others due Friday.”
Read in a cursory manner and not with the attention to detail for writeups that Communication majors and editors have, that header screams to me that a Filipino seaman has died in an attack in Nigeria (no misinterpretation there) and – this is where the misinterpretation can occur – 18 others are going to die on Friday.
Because whoever wrote that header used a semi-colon (which suggests a close connection between the concepts separated by the semi-colon). And you’re trained in all those years of reading classes in Primary and Secondary to instinctively make a more-or-less direct connection between the concept(s) before the semi-colon and the one(s) after.
You cannot expect a casual reader to make that leap of logic for the proper interpretation of what the writer originally intended. Most people who will see that header will most likely make the same misinterpretation I pointed out.
Hm. But then, that’d make you read the article, yes? What attracts more attention than news about people potentially going to get killed?
I guess, if I was his editor, and I wasn’t that concerned about the Code of Journalism Ethics, the writer didn’t exactly fail, after all.
