ClearTips: Riveting reports

What's your working title?

The title is your first chance to engage your reader, so be brief, honest, and communicative.

Compare this first attempt:

African Import Prices: 1970, 1980, and 1990

with this final:

Do African Countries Pay More for Their Exports? Yes

The title made the difference for a World Bank working paper, reviewed by every major African newspaper as well as London's Financial Times.

Another conventional title:

Strategies for Implementing Reform

injected with a bit of urgency:

Reform Can't Wait

And a typically bureaucratic title:

Economic Growth and Public Investment

made a bit more engaging:

From Boom to Bust-and Back?

The overview of a recent Human Development Report had this as the title of its opening chapter:

Overview

But it was the following title that put the overview on the map:

The Revolution for Gender Equality

Here's another title that may have been true:

A Comparative Analysis of Commodity-Dependent Economies in Developing Countries

but that became the subtitle for the more memorable:

Plundering Agriculture

The best titles are memorable and easy to repeat. A Comparative Analysis of Commodity-Dependent Economies in Developing Countries did not fall trippingly off the tongue, but Plundering Agriculture remains in readers' minds years after publication.

In your titles, avoid words like:

procedures for
overview of
experiment in
review of
findings of
summary of
report on
issues surrounding
strategy for
implications of
investigation into

And don't get stuck with your first working title, as most writers do. Instead, continually scrutinize your working title to see how you can further refine it to be true to your messages and readers.

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