Today, and always, we have come reading newspapers and always we have noticed that the headlines have come attracting us like anything and we always stick to the contents of the headlines which succeed in attracting and getting us to the contents. We always like to read contents of all those headings which we want to read. And as we know that today editorship of a magazine or a newspaper is a very big honoureven if the newspaper or the magazine company is not so big and multinational or something like that, but editorship is something which is a signboard of prestige and glory to the person's name and as we all know, he should be a really talented person when it comes to language usage knowledge.
We know that the main work of the editor is to edit the things and write them in the correct order with the correct grammatical usage and with something which we call "notable" usage of language. Here we are talking about English and in this particular topic, we are going to discuss about headlines. What are we mainly focusing on here? We are mainly focusing on the skills needed to have to prepare a good headline and also focusing about writing an elaboration.
There are many things which need to be kept in mind when things are related to headlines -
Short - Definitely, the headlines should be short, because if the headlines are too long sentences, then the readers tend to drive away from the headlines because short headlines can draw attention of the readers better than the long ones. The headlines need to be short because the main aim of headlines is to convey a short, a very short description of the whole content in a short manner, so that if the reader thinks that he can find something good in the content, he may know it and then continue to read it full. Otherwise, if he comes to know that the content is not usable to him, or the content is not needed to be read by him, then he can quit that content and shift to read another one. Thus, the main objective of using headlines is to keep the readers up by saving their time in a very good manner, so the headlines should be short.
Precise - Someone has said it right that entitling things is an art. Yes, when it comes to contents in newspapers, one needs to be very accurate when writing the headlines because the headlines should be purely accurate to the topic.
It often happens that readers are deviated from the main idea of the content because when reading the headlines, they think that it would be very closely related to what they are actually thinking about but when they read the content, they find that due to some error in the headlines, the content does not exactly match with the headline which is used to brief up the content. This irritates the reader.
Detailed - It would be nonsense to say that the headlines should be detailed. No, of course not, the headlines can't be detailed more than the content under that headline concerned. Here, by the word "detailed", we mean to say that the headlines should be detailed "as much as possible". They need to deliver the maximum idea which they can convey to the reader, helping the reader save his time just by reading the headlines.
Eye-Catchy - Last, but not the least, very importantly, the headlines should be eye catchy. They should be capable to grasp the reader's eyes, immediately after they read the first couple of words in the headlines.
The headlines should be accurately to the point, but at the same time, the quality of headline is mainly determined by how eye-catchy it is.
Sample Usage
Here is an example of a headline for a given content.
70 died in plane crash
Mumbai. October 17th. While coming from Kolkata to Delhi, a plane, belonging to the Air India company, got it's left engine failed due to fire in it and it crashed some 50 kilometres away from the Airport. 70 unlucky passengers breathed their last on the plane while only 23 survived. Both the pilots met their creators due to the crash. However, those survived also were badly injured. It is sure that this crash would leave a big impact on their lives. However, the government has tried to pay sympathy to the families whose members died in the plane crash.
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