Shakespeare’s Juliet asked “What’s in a name?”, and the playwright supplied an answer -“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But would it? Do names matter? Each year, the Social Security Administration publishes a list of the most popular baby names. Ten years ago, for example, parents were naming their boys Aiden, […]

  Blog post titles have a multifaceted job to do, arousing readers’ curiosity while still assuring them they’ve come to the right place. One compromise I’ve suggested to blog content writers is using a two-tiered title, combining a “Huh?” (to get attention) with an “Oh!” (to make clear what the post is actually going to […]

What’s “Into the Endgame” about? (How Parliament should weigh up the Brexit deal, of course.) What about “Click to Download Teacher”? (Technology can help solve the problem of bad, absent teachers in poor-country schools.) “The New Abnormal”? (California faces the most destructive fire in its history). And “Drop It!”? (An argument about firearms will help […]

Ideas and Discoveries Magazine had a very good idea in terms of titles (which we blog content writers can make good use of) – using question words. The tactic of question titles is one I’ve often suggested to new Indianapolis blog content writers. Keeping in mind that people are online searching for answers to questions […]

There are two types of titles, I realized, browsing the business section at my favorite local bookstore: 1. The “Huh?s” need subtitles to make clear what the article is about. 2. The “Oh!’” titles are self-explanatory. Whether in a book or a blog post, the title serves as a “tease” to get a browser to […]

Since we’ve been focusing on effective titles in my last couple of Say It For You posts, I couldn’t help but notice a certain article in my August issue of Financial Planning. The title reads “A Sector to Watch” and the article by Craig Israelsen is about including commodities in a portfolio to provide diversification […]

  A couple of years ago at Say It For You, I began calling attention to the idea of using certain literary devices in business blog titles with an eye to making them more “catchy”.  In addition to alliteration, a second creative writing technique is “threesomes”. The same Fortune magazine that used those ten alliterative […]

People are drawn to articles with negative titles, points out friend and fellow blogger Lorraine Ball. Why? Because, Lorraine answers, they are afraid of doing something wrong. All too often, she observes, writers take the safe, boring route, choosing a headline that sounds like every other headline.  Instead, she advises trying to be bold, which […]