HE LED JUNGLE
GUERRILLAS
when the news is
CHE GUEVERA
SHOT DEAD
The ‘he did this or the other’ headline is justified only when it concerns the death of a person who has become obscure but who once did something outstanding or bizarre: ‘He rode Niagara Falls in a barrel’. Otherwise stick to names in obituaries. Almost as fatuous as the ‘he did’ variety are the formulae:
FAMOUS MANCHESTER-BORN COMEDIAN DIES
DEATH OF WELL-KNOWN CHESHIRE PEER
These confuse the purpose of a headline with the purpose of a contents bill. The concealment on the bill may induce people to buy the paper. But in the page it does not invite them to read it.
The weakest form of subject in a headline is ‘he’ or ‘she’. It is not an identification.
HE FORECASTS A
30 HOUR
WEEK SOON
That story turned out to be about a Labour MP and former cabinet minister. ‘MP’ would have been more specific and would have given the headline more authority. There is a rule for identification. ‘Man’ or ‘woman’, for instance, is weak, though sometimes inevitable. ‘Wife, father, mother, husband’, are better because they narrow the field – always provided the story is something to do with the individuals as wives, fathers, and so on. It is not good practice to use the word ‘husband’ as another word for ‘man’ or ‘driver’ when the fact that he is married has nothing to do with the story.
HUSBAND
BANNED
AT RACES
This suggests his wife can go in and he has been barred – it could even be for some matrimonial reason. But, given that the specific description does not introduce a distortion into our understanding of the story, always prefer the specific. Do not say ‘child’ in a headline if the child is not yet two. Say ‘baby’. For instance:
TERRORISTS KILL YOUNG ISRAELI
‘Young’ is too vague. The story is that terrorists killed a three-year-old boy. ‘Israeli boy’ would have been better here, and altogether better:
RAIDERS KILL ISRAELI BOY OF 3
There is one final device affecting the subject in the headline. This is the construction of headlines beginning ‘The man … who’. This formula is acceptable when identification is important:
THE MAN WITH BRIGHT IDEAS
DOES IT AGAIN FOR £1,000
It is more appealing to say ‘The man with bright ideas’ than ‘Factory worker’, or the man’s name which is not widely known. ‘The man who’ formula can also be used on headlines over pictures of the subject or on lighter stories where the headline relaxes:
THE BOY WHO PULLED OUT A TOOTH
WITH AN E-TYPE JAGUAR
The odd circumstances can themselves be enough to justify this, but not always. The implication of this style of headline is that the reader is going to be given extra details about the subject, and so it will not do on a news report which merely states a fact without elaborating any personal details.
Be Specific
The vaguer the description the duller the head. What is there in this to make the skimmer of the headlines stop and read the story?
DEVELOPMENT PLAN HELD UP
Every rebuilding story could be headed ‘Development’ just as the architect’s model of a redevelopment scheme could be headed, as I once saw it, ‘Development in miniature’. Nobody is interested in ‘development’, but they are interested in new schools, roads, shops, banks, parking, swimming pools. They are interested in specifics, in short, and not the abstract and the general. The head ‘Development plan held up’ was on a story which really said:
NEW SCHOOL DELAYED
‘Plan’ itself, of course, is another headline killer. It is so general, so vague, so meaningless: ‘£500,000 plan inquiry’. Figures rarely sing in heads. This headline seems quite remote from the real world of the reader. In fact the story announced that there was to be a public inquiry into a proposal to build a hotel near York Minster – a hotel with a shopping precinct and a bank. Any one of these specifics – hotel, shops, Minster –would have sent a signal to the reader. Always look for the specific which will illuminate a head, which will give an instant picture of the activity: not that someone has a ‘big new appointment’ but what it involves; not ‘river accident’ or ‘road tragedy’ or ‘daring raid’, but what happened. For instance:
CITY
GANG
MAKE
BIG HAUL
might be anything from stealing the Crown Jewels to robbing the Bank of England. Contrast the interest of the headline based on the real specific activity in that story:
GANG ROBS
400
PARKING
METERS
These injunctions apply especially strongly to headlining speeches. It is never enough to say ‘Opposition attacks Government’. That is what we expect. Only by pinpointing the detail can the headline hope to prove interest.
Saying Where
The injunction to be specific means specific about genuine news and not about irrelevancies. Of these the most intrusive in the headline is the location of the news; the ‘where’ of the story. It should only be included when the location is an integral, rather than an incidental, part of the news, and this should be the rule for local as well as national newspapers. Where something happened is usually less newsy than what happened.
It is normally said that foreign stories should carry locations and home stories should not. This is of some help, but it needs refining: How specific a foreign location? And when does a domestic place name warrant inclusion in the head? The real test must be whether including the place name adds significance. There is clearly no need to say ‘De Gaulle condemns rioters in Paris speech’. It will do just to say ‘De Gaulle condemns rioters’. But the rule of significance does from time to time necessitate inclusion of a precise foreign place name. When de Gaulle made his speech in Quebec advocating French nationalism it was essential to the headlines to say that he made it in Quebec. The fact that he addressed French Canadians in this way in a French-speaking city while a guest of the Canadian Government was not incidental to the news: it was an integral part of it.
The test of significance should be carried over into home and local news. It is right for a national paper to headline a story ‘Epidemic moves into Cheshire’ because where foot-and mouth disease spreads is the news. A local paper would be right to refine that further, since doing so would add significance for local readers: ‘Foot-and-mouth spreads to Tarporley farm’. But I would suggest that local papers should pause before automatically thrusting locations into headlines irrespective of significance. The theory is that local readers will be drawn to the story because it has a local place name. For sports stories there are special considerations but the practice of including place names in every news head needs rather more than custom to justify it.
Broadly, there are two types of local paper: those circulating in a limited local area, usually evening and weekly newspapers in Britain; and those circulating in a wide area, over two or three counties for an English provincial morning or part of a state, say, in the United States. If the paper with a concentrated circulation area is doing its job properly and cramming the inside pages with local news, its readers should safely be able to assume that headlines there automatically refer to local news. There is no need to labour the fact by putting in the town every time. Moreover by encouraging the reader in this assumption, by proper grouping of the news, the headlines can be made to work harder. Without monotonous repetition of place names, heads are at once livelier and there is more space to say something meaningful.
Now consider the paper circulating over a wider area. A local name is only local to a limited number of people in each wide edition area: in other words by including the local name you are as likely to repel as many readers as you attract, or even more. And local names in heads give an inhibiting and parochial air when the stories themselves are good enough to survive on their
genuine news merits.
ELWICK MAN ON MURDER CHARGE:
REMANDED AGAIN AT HARTLEPOOL
This was a story which might have been headlined:
FARM WORKER OF 21 DENIES
MURDERING TEACHER
Again, ‘Two-car crash at Middlesbrough’ might have been headed ‘Baby escapes unhurt in two-car crash’. And when a good headline also has a place name, does the place name really ignite more interest? ‘PC bitten by howling Alsatian’ is enough for most people wherever they live; the addition of ‘at Gateshead’ can be something of an anticlimax.
Be Positive
Be specific, then: but also be positive. Some stories must carry a negative statement in the headline (‘Dockers refuse pay offer’), but there is nothing more deadening than a series of abominable ‘No’ headlines, which merely say ‘No news today’.
NO CLUES REPORTED ON MISSING BANKER
New York City Police yesterday reported ‘no luck’ in their hunt for a missing Lockport banker and attorney who disappeared from his home on August 26. ‘We’ve got no clues’, said a Missing Persons Bureau spokesman in the search for 44-year-old Joseph Thomas Symes, married and the father of three. ‘The mystery just gets deeper’, etc.
NO RECORD IN DUBLIN
Alan Simpson, the United Kingdom mile record holder, produced another blistering finish to win the international mile event in three minutes 56.9 seconds at the John F. Kennedy Stadium last night. But any hopes of the Yorkshireman breaking Michel Jazy’s recently set world record of three minutes 53.6 seconds faded on a slow second lap.
These are different types of ‘No’ stories. The first would clearly be news if there was a clue. The other depends for its justification on the degree of expectation of Simpson breaking the record. But both could convey their information more positively, the Simpson headline by highlighting the 3 seconds from a record:
MYSTERY OF MISSING
BANKER GROWS
SIMPSON 3.3 OFF
RECORD
If the line about the mystery had not been in the banker story the head could still have been expressed without the direct negative: ‘Police draw blank on missing banker’. In the sports story, the 3.3 will be understood in context – but it would be necessary in editing the text to write in that Simpson missed the record by 3.3 seconds. The text should immediately support the head without the reader having to do a calculation. The most frequent source of a ‘no’ head is the denial story:
EPIDEMIC ‘IS NOT THREAT TO MEAT’
A report that the foot-and-mouth epidemic was threatening the domestic meat supply was described by the Minister of Agriculture yesterday as premature.
This story could carry the news more actively and positively:
MEAT SUPPLY IS
STILL SAFE
It is harder to avoid hesitant headlines, but do ration the insipid ‘may’. Obviously neither text editor nor reporter must press the facts for a headline, but some stories which invite a ‘may’ headline could often carry a more positive emphasis. ‘Bloggs likely to earn place in first Test’ is better and may even be more accurate, too, than ‘Bloggs may …’ ‘Forecast’, ‘expects’, ‘fears’, ‘considers’ are equally useful variants.
A succession of polysyllabic words slows the reading and comprehension of a headline. Consider the opposite:
GIRL LOST TEN DAYS
FOUND DEAD
IN LOVERS’ LANE
That is nine words and ten syllables. It gives all the information quickly and coherently. It does no violence to the language. Without twisting the facts it is possible to insist on short, simple words. English is rich in them. Banned is acceptable for prohibited; neutral for uncommitted; talks does express the meaning of negotiations; goods are commodities (except perhaps in the business pages). Consider the way long (and often abstract)words obscure the facts; and the way short simple words charge the heads with meaning:
IMPLEMENTATION OF
MORE SCIENCE TEACHING
SCIENCE EDUCATION
IN SCHOOLS SOON
PROGRAMME
A good test is to say the headline aloud. Does the wording trip off the tongue? If instead it trips up, try writing another.
Single Thoughts
Simplicity in headlines does not merely mean simple words: it equally means the simple expression of a single thought. Effectively to convey one single idea in the limited space of a headline requires skill; to convey two ideas in the same space, with the same intelligibility, requires a rare genius. Just as a sentence becomes difficult to follow when it is overloaded with separate ideas, so does a headline. Two breaths are needed for ‘Gambling ice-cream man’s brain operation called off as he seeks group help’. The ‘as he’ construction generally means that the writer is wandering too far from a vivid single news point. The next head suffers from trying to say too much in one breath and the separated form of attribution increases the confusion.
CRITICAL SIX MONTHS, BUT, DESPITE
PRESSURE, NO REFLATION – CHANCELLOR
It is best to omit one of the thoughts in the headline and simply say:
CHANCELLOR RESISTS PRESSURE
FOR QUICK REFLATION
Text editors handling a complicated story which creates difficulties for headline writing should mentally stand back from its intricacies and ask themselves: what is the simple effect of all these words? Without retreating into meaningless generality it may then be possible to write the head on the broad intent of the story.
We have now analysed all the basic constituents of a good headline sentence, which can be edited into the actual headline. To recapitulate, they are:
An uncluttered single thought
which is positive
and specific
expressed with a strong verb
in the active voice
in short simple words.
These ground rules are summed up in the adage mentioned earlier:
MAN BITES DOG
That is a good news story – but also a first-class headline. It expresses a specific and single item of news positively, with an active verb and in simple words. Some of the headline deficiencies I have discussed would produce this version:
INFLICTS WOUND
ON CANINE,
AVER POLICE
The Key Word
We know what the constituents of the news headline should be, and the general rules. These are a guide for livelier, clearer headlines, not a prescription for monotony. The rules are not meant to restrict your native genius or torture the news. A rule can be broken – if you know why you are breaking it. Before moving on to specialised headlines and variations I would like briefly to discuss the label headline and suggest another technique which may help towards the right headline.
I advised earlier that the first thing to do as you read the text is to note separately the sentence summing up the news and then edit it for a headline; a headline sculpted from a sentence should have a better chance of retaining some grammatical integrity and intelligibility. There is another technique for headline construction, which is to note down the individual words that make the story unique, that make it news. Sometimes a single word is the key to the headline and however the headline sentence is constructed, the head will be weaker without the key word, whether it be noun, verb or adjective. Flaubert put the matter more elegantly to Maupassant:
Whatever one wishes to say, there is only one noun to express it, only one verb to give it life, only one adjective to qualify it. Search, then, till that noun, that verb, that adjective are discovered; never be content with ‘very nearly’; never have recourse to tricks, however happy; or to buffooneries of language to avoid a difficulty.
This is too idealistic a doctrine for headline writers, and too extreme as well: headline writers denied all synonyms might occasionally create prose but they would risk their sanity in the process. What we should do, in approximation, is to seek out the single word or words which at least make this headline different from any
other.
Essential English Page 25