Title Me Please

From Sam Meyer

“Prose by Any Other Name:

A Context for Teaching the Rhetoric of Titles”

The Composing Process

• The title is as important in your paper as the first sentence. A good title will draw the reader into your essay even if your lead is not that interesting.

• The title should also be a work in progress. Think of different titles as you write, jotting them down as you write the paper.

• Name the paper before or after• Titles often reflect an author’s creative progress

and help the writer focus and concretize his or her thoughts.

Composing Continued

• A provisional title functions as a mechanism for invention.

• When successful, the title also affords the reader some kind of insight into the work, and, thus, authors are especially interested in titling their works.

• The title also establishes the first contact with the reader.

• The title also describes the work, indicates genre, suggests its mood, or reflects it essential message.

Author’s Thoughts

Graham Greene, “incapable of working on anything unnamed.”

Henry David Thoreau wanted to drop Life in the Woods from Walden because he feared his audience was taking it too literally and thus losing the more important transcendental philosophy.

Hemingway made titles from using Ecclesiastes and The Oxford Book or English Verse. He also asked friends to help select the final title.

An Editor’s Thoughts

Maxwell Perkins (Editor for Scribner’s)“The title is extremely important, and since there is

no logical process …” We have often had great struggles over a title, and

thought it might be a bad one. Then the title has succeeded supremely, and it seemed the only title that was conceivable for it. The title came to fit the book …”

The title should give the quality of the book, if possible – or else it should be appealing, and should reflect the quality of the book after one has read it.”

Normative Titles

• Titles in the normative category span a wide range of grammatical forms, subject specificity, and connotations.

• Prepositional Phrases– “Of Repentance” or “Of Human Bondage”

• Participial or Infinitive Phrases– “Concerning the Unpredictable”– “To Defend the Rights of the Hopeless”

Normative Titles

• Noun Preceded by an Adjective– “The Passenger Pigeon”

• Declarative Statements– “Pain is the Ultimate Enemy”

• Simple Nouns– “The Group” or “Graduation”

• Questions– “Is God Hard to Find?”

Imagistic Titles

• A title that combines figures of speech or images that involve change or extension in the literal or obvious meaning of words.

• Figures of Speech: Oxymoron, Paradox, Simile, Metaphor, Allegory, Symbol, Pun, Irony

• “Civil Disobedience”• Good as Gold• Pilgrim’s Progress• The Scarlet Letter• “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”

Allusive Titles

• Titles quoted from literary works or other antecedents

• In Dubious Battle (from a poem)• Lie Down in Darkness (from a poem)• A Deadly Shade of Gold, Pale Gray for Guilt, etc• The Quick and the Dead (Biblical)• With Friends Like These (proverb)• You Only Live Twice (proverb)• Across the River and Into the Trees

(from General Stonewall Jackson’s final words)

Special Effect Titles

• The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby

• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test• “I Led the Pigeons to the Flag”

(I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag)• “I Want to go to the Prose”