piątek, 3 czerwca 2011

Writing Tips To Create Effective Headlines

By Victor Hood


Headlines serve the purpose of getting the attention of the reader. With a good headline, the reader gets intrigued to read the article, brochure, newsletter or ad. There are many techniques employed to produce effective headlines.

Creating the curiosity of the reader is what you need to remember when you create a headline. To do this, you can ask a provocative question or make outrageous statement in the headline. On familiar phrases, you can use word play and alliteration in order to create eye-catching and amusing headlines. If the reader finds it difficult to read the headline, then they may not read it at all so it's always better to avoid ambiguity.

It's important for the headline to provide an answer to the reader asking 'what's in it for me?' The primary benefit that the reader would get from reading the article is what you need to mention. Through the headline, you could even provide a solution to a common problem. Always keep the headline as sweet and short as possible. The ideal length for headlines is seven words or less. This is because shorter headlines are punchier and easier to read.

Lying to your customers through the headline is a big no-no. Befitting to the headline of the article is the article that you provide. This is because on reading the headline, the reader will be expecting a story, and if the story produced is something completely different, it is most likely that the reader will feel cheated. In the headline, make sure to capitalize the first word and all the proper nouns. Capitalizing every word is wrong because the uniformity of the headline is then lost.

Those that have logical sentence structures, active voice, and strong present tense verb are proven to be the most effective headlines. It is the good verbs that always drive good headlines. You can locate the headline of an article flush to the left of the page unless it's been mentioned. All headlines should use present tense for immediate past information, past tense for past perfect while future tense is used for coming events. When it comes to headlines, the punctuation formal are basically normal. Periods should be used for abbreviations only and single quotes should be used where double quotes would be used in copy. Don't split verb pieces between lines of the ending lines with prepositions or between headlines. Doing this will make the headlines look untidy. You could produce effective headlines for your articles as long as you keep these pointers in mind.




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