Academic Titles

One seemingly minor but actually quite telling indicator of a writer's grasp of academic discourse is how the writer creates a title. For many first-year students of writing, the purpose of the title of an academic paper is not well understood. Often, students will entitle their papers with clever phrases that do not reflect the specific content of the paper, or they will simply write "Assignment 1" or "Essay" at the top of their papers. While these titles may suffice for mere classroom exercises, they do not take on the quality of a title meant for the context of real research. For real research, titles must, as hinted above, reflect the specific content of the paper. As with all other elements of your papers, your title must serve the larger purpose of research. When scholars go on the hunt for material they can use for their own projects (whether through databases, tables of contents, or other means), they expect to find titles at a glance which clearly and effectively alert them to the specific focus of that work. Because research is often a demanding undertaking, efficiency is key in directing readers toward desirable material. Through an aptly worded, well-constructed title, you do your reader a service in that process of sifting through mountains of academic discourse.

Academic titles have one essential element: signification of specific content. This cannot be overemphasized. Whether the title is two words or ten, the sine qua non is always this. What this rules out then is any title which goes for cleverness at the expense of clarity. As with all elements of academic discourse, the title must therefore shun ambiguity in favor of directness. Academic audiences aren't looking for "catchy" titles, usually; as you are dealing with scholars, the fact that the paper's title clearly signifies content which will prove useful for their research will be "catchy" enough.

This is not to say that academic titles cannot be clever or have elements of the provocative; indeed, they can, and many do. However, signifying specific content is always primary; provocativeness or cleverness is always secondary. Often, these two elements are separated by a colon (:) whose purpose is to effectively create a title-and-subtitle structure, generally with the latter half of the title explaining the former. As is often the case, the clever or provocative element in the title will precede the signification of specific content, the latter of which is written in a more dull prose than the former (giving it that characteristically "dry" quality inherent in most academic prose). Here then is a diagram for a common structure of academic titles:

clever/provocative phrase: signification of specific paper content in prosaic language

This is not the only possible structure for academic titles, but it is, again, a common one. Other structures are predicated on what we could call a noun or noun phrase A as noun or noun phrase B structure. This also quite common construction is most often used in papers which advance seeing an old, familiar concept in terms of a concept in which it has not been hitherto conceived. The title "Fossil Bones as Medicine" follows this structure. Somewhat differently, the title "Augustine as Client and as Theorist" uses this construction, but here there is a noun C as well as a noun B.

Some more examples

Here are a series of titles from various disciplines.

Agriculture

"Guardians of the Horse: Past, Present, and Future"

History

"Catalysing Events, Think Tanks, and American Foreign Policy Shifts: A Comparative Analysis of the Impact of Pearl Harbor 1941 and 11 September 2001."

"Pearl Harbor: Who Deceived Whom?"

Literature

"Puzzling Out the Graced Ocassions: An Interview with Ron Hansen"

"'O let my books be ... dumb presagers': Poetry and Theater in Shakespeare's Sonnets"

"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda: How Shakespeare and the Renaissance are Taking the Rage out of Feminism"

Nursing

"A Pluralistic Approach to Resident Centered Care"

"Applications of Principles of Evidence-Based Medicine to Occlusal Treatment for Temporomandibular Disorders: Are There Lessons to be Learned?"

Other remarks

By no means do these examples or explanations cover all possible ways to create academic titles. However, these do offer a fair sampling of the kinds of titles you will be expected to construct for your own papers in this research course. The thing to remember is that, above all, the title must signify specific content and be writtten in an academic register.