Essential English
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Two cinemas in New York were told to take off ‘strip’ or ‘nude’ films; yet the key words were crowded out with a head about unspecified films being ‘rescheduled’. A policewoman chased a boy who was brandishing a bayonet and was rewarded with ‘Policewoman stuck to duty’; a label heading without the inappropriate verb would have been better – ‘Policewoman and bayonet boy’.
Labels That Work
There are times when we have to take this middle course, retaining the key words and relinquishing the verb. This produces a label headline, but there are labels and labels. There are times – perhaps one news story in a hundred – when one may with a clear conscience use a label. There may be a mixture of reasons: to avoid a weak verb while retaining key words; to fit into a tight space; to suit the text when there is no active news point; or to create a change of pace. But the words of the verbless label must be potent. If they do not actually tell the news they should indicate it. A few varying examples will illustrate the essential points.
When the first British heart transplant patient was recovering on the day after the operation, the doctors reported that he was well and added that he had given them a thumbs-up signal. Now a headline merely saying that the heart transplant patient was well would have been accurate but it would also have fitted several other operations. The key phrase for every headline was ‘thumbs up’.
HEART MAN GIVES THUMBS UP
(active but too long for the space available)
HEART MAN DOING WELL
(active and fits but too weak with omission of key words)
HEART MAN’S THUMBS UP
(a label, but it fits and with the key words it is quite strong)
HEART MAN: THUMBS UP
(an awkward split but newsy)
The label using the possessive to carry the key words is a useful economy device. Another story, in the middle of a period of Labour Party disaffection, says that MPs face a crucial test of their loyalty in a vote on the Government’s incomes policy. The active verb would be:
LABOUR MPs FACE LOYALTY TEST
But if the active head is too long you can get by with the label bearing the key words:
LABOUR’S LOYALTY TEST
A light story on what a champion jockey was dreaming of doing on retirement might have carried the active head ‘Champion jockey dreams of …’ but that was already occupying all the available space. The possessive label ‘The champion jockey’s dream’ did not tell the news but it indicated its area in a fairly tempting way by retaining the key words. These are all instances where the label has been acceptable but second best. Very occasionally it is better, for instance on a story which relies on suspense:
It looked like a big raid. Suddenly ten detectives including two chief inspectors moved into the garden of a semi-detached house yesterday. Methodically, they set about their business … with two motor mowers, garden forks, spades, rakes and clippers. But it was not a murder hunt. They were not looking for clues. The detectives were giving up a day off to tidy the overgrown garden of one of their colleagues who has been in hospital for six months …
An active news head on this story spoils the suspense and reads flatly:
DETECTIVES TIDY GARDEN
SECRET OF A CID DIG-IN
Words like ‘secret’ and ‘riddle’, if used sparingly, can rescue a difficult label head: ‘Riddle of Russian diplomat’. A combination of evocative key words may also be superior for a complicated story where no single news point merits a central position: ‘The monk and the mystery of the Mussolini diaries’.
The choice between a label and an active head requires judgment. Remember it is the label which is the exception and which needs justifying. This unjustified label, for instance, rouses no curiosity at all:
MEDICAL HAZARDS ON THE ROAD
I find myself reading another newspaper’s version headed:
HEALTH TESTS URGED FOR OLDER DRIVERS
Similarly, the active news heading ‘Girl strangled with dog lead’ is at once more intelligible and forceful with all the key words, than the confused label: ‘The missing dog murder hunt’.
Headlines in Practice
But let us now take the concept of the key word and apply it to a story, seeing what headline emerges. Note, incidentally, how frequently it is the verb which is the prime key word.
A soldier, aged 18, got a barrack room friend to chop off his trigger finger with an axe so that he could get his release from the Army, Major M. Clarke, for the prosecution, said at a Colchester court martial today.
Privates M. and B., both serving with The Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment, pleaded guilty to malingering. M. was sentenced to 112 days’ detention and B. to 126 days’ detention, both sentences being subject to confirmation.
Major Clarke said that on December 29 six soldiers were in a room discussing ways and means of getting M. out of the Army. Someone suggested he should lose his trigger finger, and B. agreed to chop it off for him. M. then lay down on his bed, put his right index finger on an upturned locker, and smoked a cigarette while B. chopped the finger off with an axe.
Captain A. B. Bower, in a plea of mitigation for M., said he was anxious to get out of the Army because his mother had lost her job, and was not getting enough money on which to bring up a large family.
For B., Captain Bower said that he thought M. was bluffing. When he realised, however, that M. was serious, he could not back down, otherwise he would have lost face with his fellow-soldiers.
The strong key words that spring from that story are:
FINGER
CHOP OFF
SOLDIER.
It is a simple matter to put these into coherent form and into a headline: ‘Soldier got friend to chop off finger’. One national daily handling the story managed this: and another, with less headline space, wrote: ‘Soldier got pal to cut off finger’. Here ‘cut off’ is distinctly weaker than ‘chop off’ because it suggests the action of a knife rather than an axe. Another, subjectless, heading was less satisfactory, with the unattributed, unquoted head ‘Please chop off my trigger finger’ (though the word trigger would just suggest the context). Two other national papers, however, headlined the story in this way:
SOLIDER ‘LOST
WHY A SOLDIER LOST
TRIGGER FINGER
HIS TRIGGER FINGER
FOR RELEASE’
We see at once how a head fails without the key verb ‘chop off’. ‘Lost’ is dreadfully weak for the sudden violent action of an axe on a man’s finger. The first head, incidentally, also illustrates the troubles that arise from trying to say too much. ‘For release’ so close to ‘trigger finger’ gives a momentary but disconcerting impression that the finger was somehow trapped and needed releasing. It does not convey ‘to get out of the Army’. (And why the quotes in this headline?) The second head fails by resorting to feature-style treatment, which is all right on a featurish story without much news, but out of place on a hard news story. Why the soldier lost his finger is, in any event, less compelling than how he lost it.
Free-style Headlines
We have been writing headlines to a strict discipline. The words we could use have been suggested by words in the text carrying the most important news point; the number of words has been limited by the amount of space available, as it must be for a newspaper handling a multiplicity of news stories, the staple of the newspaper. There are occasions when a news heading of a limited length is not suitable:
(a) When the ideas in the text are so rich and diffuse that a simple hard news head does not do them justice
(b) When the natural headline wording is so attractive (so funny, so apt) that it should be given whatever space it needs
These categories need a wide range of what I shall call free-style headlines. News-style heads always give information impartially. Free-style heads may not: they may ask a question or make a joke or be a general label. Most main features need free-style heads; but discussion under the traditional division of news a
nd features is not really helpful to us. The text is primal. Free-style heads should appear wherever the text requires, on news or features.
Here is an example broadly in category (a):
A schoolgirl is told she has failed her advanced GCE examination. Her father complains, in a complicated series of events, and at the end of it all she has her marks approximately doubled to give an excellent grade B with merit.
Now reducing that story to a hard news head with limited space produces this:
GIRL’S FAILURE
BECAME PASS
WITH MERIT
But the story is suffocated by this condensed form. The story only really came alive in a detailed free-style headline:
IT TOOK SIX LETTERS AND FOUR
EXAMINERS TO SWITCH JULIA’S
A-LEVEL FAILURE INTO A PASS WITH MERIT
There are a lot of words in that free-style head but it is easy to read because it is a complete clear sentence. But note: the free-style headline must read coherently like a sentence with punctuation marks – and no words omitted. This attempt at a free-style heading falls flat:
NOW, CAN YOU THINK OF NAME FOR
LONDON MOTORWAY BOX?
The omission of the word ‘a’ quite spoils the ring of that headline. Exceptionally vivid quotes are worth free-style treatment: when the Pope addressed the United Nations one paper soared over the commonplace headlines of its competitors (Pope pleads for peace at UN) by running his actual words across the top of the page:
‘IF YOU WISH TO BE BROTHERS
LET THE ARMS FALL FROM YOUR
HANDS . . . SWEAR: NO MORE WAR’
And again with the next story about a trawler going down. The crew is given up for dead. But one man comes ashore alive in Iceland and his wife flies to see him. A straight news-style head (Wife rejoins ‘dead’ husband) would have failed to capture the richness of the reunion in the way this paper did with a free-style head running beneath the reunion picture:
HONESTLY, DEEP INSIDE ME
I THOUGHT I WOULD
NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN
Letting the Words Take Over
Let us now venture into the disputatious area where it is the inspiration of attractive wording which breaks the bonds of the news-style head. There is no limit to innovation here: puns proliferate and allusions abound. Of course, what I think funny you may regard as the bore of the century; and what both of us agree is hilarious may be a stroke of genius from which no general guidance can be drawn. Accepting that, it may be worth saying that pun, allusion, irony, wit, metaphor, alliteration and anticlimax are all acceptable fathers of free-style heads which are better than straight news heads. Borrowing a current catch-phrase for a heading, be it from a pop song, an advertising campaign, a film title, a novel or a TV comedian, requires superb timing.
The moment perhaps lasts a week. ‘Hard day’s night’, ‘Back to the future’, ‘No room at the inn’ and numerous others too painful to mention have seemed to survive as if pickled. But – and it’s only my opinion – a very ancient catch-phrase may be revived successfully in a head. A small illustration will suffice. When a new hotel was opened, small sections of the plasterboard ceiling fell down at a celebration lunch. These were the straight news heads:
CEILING COLLAPSES AT £2M HOTEL OPENING
CEILING FALLS AT HOTEL OPENING
CEILING COLLAPSE PROBED AT HOTEL OPENING
CRASH GOES CEILING AT £2M HOTEL
These are all right as far as they go, but they suffer by being cast in the straight news mould; they tend to overdo the seriousness of the incident. ‘Ceiling collapse’ conjures up a calamity and this is why the label ‘The day the ceiling fell in’ would be softer, the Thurber style being a hint that nothing really serious happened. But a free-style head with allusion to an old joke tells the news perfectly in harmony with a formal lunch:
WAITER!
There’s part
of the
ceiling
in my soup
A good light head has a core of news; and writers must not be caught giggling at their own joke by exclamation marks, quotes, underlining italic or any other red-nose devices of prose. If you are in doubt about an allusion, a good test is to ask yourself whether the head, in making its joke, also indicates the news. If it does not, you have almost certainly strayed too far in your enthusiasm.
Good and Bad Puns
Most injury is caused by clumsy puns or ill-kempt metaphors. On a story about tyre regulations: ‘Motorists “tyre” of these regulations’. On a story of a road offence: ‘Kerbing his exuberance’. On a story of cemetery vandalism: ‘Two youths given grave sentences’. The metaphors are self-conscious and contrived – and puns which have to be trussed in quotes should not be allowed out.
Puns on people’s names should be avoided. They and everyone else stopped laughing at that one at the christening. I am not against puns in heads. Let Fowler set the standard: ‘The assumption that puns are per se contemptible, betrayed by the habit of describing every pun not as a pun but as a bad pun or a feeble pun, is a sign at once of sheepish docility and desire to seem superior. Puns are good, bad and indifferent, and only those who lack the wit to make them are unaware of the fact.’ So some good puns:
A debate in the Indian Parliament on whether saris too revealing should be banned:
A SARI WITHOUT A FRINGE ON TOP
A film review:
JAMES STEWART FASTER ON THE DRAWL
Feature Headings
Most main feature heads should be free-style in the sense that the wording should dictate the layout. This does not necessarily mean long wording. Two or three words may be the most apposite and then the typography should be adjusted to display them. Many news text editors seem all at sea writing feature heads. What can they grasp for projection? There is no news to tell in the traditional way, so the simplicity, urgency and stridency of the news head will be wrong unless it happens to be an exposé feature. A few guides may be offered. If the feature has an especially colourful phrase, let that be the head. If the feature sets out to answer set questions, pose the questions. Just who are the speculators? Well what really goes into a meat pie? What is the cost of a night out? For general feature heads, there are certain formula constructions which come to the rescue provided they reflect the emphasis of the text. These formula headings are based on the how, what, wherefore syndrome. For instance:
WHEN IT PAYS TO LIVE IN SIN
WHEN LOVE TURNED SOUR
WHY YOUNG GERMANY EXPLODED
HOW THEY PLANNED THE HEART TRANSPLANT
THE TRUTH ABOUT BUST DEVELOPERS
WHERE MAJOR WENT WRONG
Making these formula headings live means choosing key words after the initial word sets the scope of the piece. It might be helpful to analyse a feature headline on text which told how Francis Crick and James Watson worked out the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, universally called DNA. The paper they published won each of them a Nobel Prize; and the text says it has proved to be the key for unlocking some of the fundamental secrets of life. They were in competition at one stage with the celebrated chemist, Dr Linus Pauling. Here are some of the stages to an accepted popularised feature headline for two articles:
HOW THEY WON A NOBEL PRIZE
Too unspecific, could apply to all Nobel prizewinners.
HOW THEY DISCOVERED DNA
DNA will not signal a great deal to all readers. Can we say: secret of life? A good phrase but needs care.
HOW THEY HELPED TO DISCOVER THE SECRET OF LIFE
Too strong: the text says it was the key to unlocking some of the fundamental secrets of life. They have taken one stride, but others must follow, so the headline must not suggest we know all there is to know about life.
HOW THEY HELPED TO DISCOVER THE SECRET OF LIFE
More nearly accurate, but ‘helped’ is a weak word. So is ‘aimed’ which underplays their success. Can we make a feature of the competition with the other scientists? Yes, the text see
ms to support this even to the extent of the word ‘race’.
HOW THEY RACED TO DISCOVER THE SECRET OF LIFE
Stronger wording but ‘raced to discover’ is wordy and may be open to the objection again that ‘discover’ suggests all was in fact discovered. We need a head which retains ‘race’, which is one element of what they were doing, and ‘secret of life’, which was their objective.
THE RACE . . . THE SECRET OF LIFE