Just as we use the ‘inverted pyramid’ model to organise information on a web page or in a news article, the same top-heavy principle applies to writing headlines for web content.
The second headline reads: Brown moves ahead with plans for slavery. Easily misunderstood!
This image (right) is a snippet from my RSS feedreader. It shows three headlines from the Boston Globe’s education section. Because the feedreader appears in a small ‘portlet’ within my web browser, space for headlines is limited — anything more than 45 characters gets automatically truncated.
Thus the second headline in the image reads:
“Brown moves ahead with plans for slavery”
Hmm. Probably not quite the image Brown University wants to convey about itself. In fact, it’s better known as a leader in liberal arts and humanities education.
It’s ony when you click the headline and read the entire article that things become clear — Brown University is building a museum to collect and exhibit items relating to the history of slavery. So the headline in my feedreader should have said:
“Brown U plans slavery museum”
This version of the headline clarifies that “Brown” is the university, not some random person named Brown, and conveys the idea that the museum about slavery does not yet exist, but that the university is actively working to create it.
The phrase “moves ahead with” is the culprit here. It’s an example of sloppy writing, adding nothing substantial to the meaning of the headline. Worse, it takes up unnecessary space and prevents the important, meaningful word “museum” from appearing in the feedreader display. A similar effect would occur in search results for this article, or if I were reading the Boston Globe online via my mobile phone or PDA.
Online communication uses lots of microcontent, small chunks of information that can be automatically identified and re-used by multiple applications.
Common examples of microcontent:
Headlines, captions on images, subheadings, link text, the text in a web page’s <title> tag, and an email subject line
To write great headlines, you need to master three things:
- an understanding of the rules of grammar
- a grasp of how web applications use microcontent (I’d suggest starting with content management systems, blog publishing software, search engines and RSS feedreaders)
- regular practice and feedback
.
References
William Strunk Jr (1918): The Elements of Style. See especially the section titled “Omit needless words”
Jakob Nielsen: Write for reuse (article 2 March 2009), Microcontent: headlines, page titles, and subject lines (article 6 September 1998) and list of articles about writing for the web
Wikipedia articles about microcontent and the related concept of microformats
Tags: inverted pyramid, microcontent, journalism, microformat, editing, headlines
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