Academic Titles: Supplement to a Previous Blog

As you know, I am asking for your titles so I can formulate a program for our upcoming presentations and introduce you and your papers to the class properly. Among the emails I received with your titles, one presented a particularly interesting case in terms of title structure, and it brings up an issue I may not have communicated in our academic title lesson. I would like to remedy that here.

Consider the following title: "Pope Defuses Tension on Visit to Turkey"

For an academic context, this title would need a little revision. As you might have noticed, this actually reads a lot more like a headline for a newspaper article, deriving its journalistic feel from its bare subject + predicate + direct object (+ prepositional phrase) skeletal structure. Academic titles are almost always nouns or noun phrases and do not have predicates.

Something more like "Defusing Tensions: Pope Benedict's Visit to Turkey" would be much more like an academic title. Notice it's all nouns or noun phrases.

How titles are structured, then, depends on situation and discourse community. For journalistic settings, the way to construct titles (there called "headlines") differs from the way to construct academic titles. So, when you're looking at your title, do a little discourse analysis and parse the title. Does it follow the structure of a journalistic title? A novel title? An academic title? Again, a command of the discourse will be evident on all levels, from the title to the works cited, from larger paragraphs to single words.