Titles That Grab the Reader

Time has to be budgeted as much as (or even more than) money. While others may have more or less cash, we are all given the same number of hours in a day. For the same reason I will not spend $10 for rotten food or a shirt that falls apart, I do not want to spend fifteen minutes reading something that is useless to me. This is why titles have become so important as I scan the book shelf, magazine index, or a list of search results. I am looking for something to grab my interest and give me a reason to spend ten minutes or an hour with that piece of writing.

Because I demand a good title before I read something, I feel I should give a good title when I write. In 2009, I wrote an essay that ended up being published by the Winnipeg Free Press in part because it had a title that grabbed the reader. Would you want to spend time with the story, "My Daughter Joined a Gang"?  Click on this link if the title grabbed you and there is a desire to read the rest of the story.
http://kgsolutions.ca/gang.htm

The professor for the writing course I took last fall used the title for my final project to discuss with the class ways of building a great title. "Million Dollar Baby" was the top line followed by "The Cost of a Teen Pregnancy". This figure was the amount I had calculated (on the spreadsheets in Appendix A) as the difference in lifelong earnings between a teen having a child before completing high school and a woman in her mid to late twenties starting a family after graduating with a university degree. My Canadian History course last Spring ended with a paper titled:  “In Flanders Fields, From the Pen of John McCrae to the November Boutonnière."

I consider titles to be a puzzle to solve. If you are stuck with a great piece of writing but no title, tell me about it and maybe we could brainstorm some ideas around. Many ideas came to me while I was in the shower or washing dishes. Folding laundry and vacuuming are other mindless tasks that leave your frontal cortex available to explore title possibilities. Now that the weather is nice, you can rake my lawn if you need a mindless activity to do while thinking about a title. Staring at the blank space on a computer screen has not proven to be very useful for me.