Trying Titles First
John Thompson
Department of Sociology
St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan
“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought;
words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”
—W. H. Auden
In writing essays, students seem to follow advice I received in my school days: write titles last. The
advice has a certain sense to it. Once you’ve written an essay and know what it’s about, you can then
compose a title which fits the essay. The additional advice I received on titles was to attempt some
alliteration, but avoid just being clever. For many students I teach, titles are afterthoughts. Some titles are
written in ink at the top of printed essays. A few essays still arrive without titles. Writing titles gets scant
attention and has nothing to do with actually composing an essay. Writing more than thirty-five
impromptu essays in front of students has taught me the benefits of beginning with titles. Here I describe
those benefits.
Getting started
Few of us are not waylaid by procrastination in writing an essay. Starting by writing titles is a low-risk,
uncomplicated, and even playful way to get started. It’s easy. I tell students they can even write titles on
the bus. There are no wrong titles and few errors in grammar or punctuation. Trying titles first is a way of
breaking through resistance of getting down to writing. Writing a number of titles quickly involves an
exploration which almost effortlessly draws me into writing and into a topic. By way of illustration, I list
fifteen of the twenty-seven titles I wrote in seven or eight minutes to start this essay.
titles first
all overboard, titles first
titles first, finding one’s thoughts
titles first, finding a thesis
titles are not afterthoughts
first or last? titles as integral to essays
titles: tips for starting an essay
titles for brainstorming
titles and talking to myself about topics
titles, or “how do I know what I’m thinking until I see what I write?”
titles, disguised thesis statements
titles – theses in hiding
sneaking up on a thesis statement – starting with titles
meaning making: titles and writing as discovery
making meaning: titles and the search for a point of view
Writing titles fosters the “occurring” to which Leacock (afire and Safir 1992:116) refers: “Writing is not
hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy — it’s the
occurring that’s hard.”
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Listening to words
Sensitivity to words is basic to writing. Starting with titles can be playing with words and their associations. By
attending not only to the meanings of words but also to their sounds, we can increase our sensitivity to
language. As a process of letting words surface, starting with titles is closer to speaking than to writing. More
like an oral form, composing titles evokes unspoken associations of words, cultural context, and meanings that
lurk just below the surface of our awareness. One word suggests another. One word connects to another, often
unexpectedly. Words change places with each other and make nuances not noticed. Metaphors suggest new
leads. Starting with titles can make us more sensitive to the words we use, not only to their denotations but to
their connotations and subtle associations. Words carry our culture in and out of our consciousness. Writing
titles is an abbreviated conversation with myself about a topic.
Brainstorming
Words allow us to express as well as to explore our thoughts. By starting with titles, we can elicit our
opinions, even though implicit, about a topic. As a form of brainstorming, starting with titles permits us to
uncover our opinions as a first step toward locating a working point of view on a topic. Not only does this
approach permit students to explore their opinions, it treats their points of view as worthwhile. It gives
legitimacy to their opinions as a point of departure in developing an essay through exploring ideas. It
allows students to find out what’s on their minds, that they have multiple, even opposing, viewpoints. At
the same time, starting with titles does not reduce essay writing to one’s opinion.
Finding and Giving Focus
Developing a working thesis statement is fundamental to essay writing and move beyond simply opinion.
Some students do not know this. Most seem to have serious difficulty in developing a thesis statement. In
starting with titles, I have noticed that each title contains an implicit thesis statement, or at least the intimations
of one. The fifteen titles listed above can be seen as capsule or compact theses – “theses in hiding” as one title
puts it. The fifteen titles as a whole represent an exploration or brainstorming about starting an essay by writing
titles, generating different, though related, implicit theses for an essay. Among the titles are some on which I
have drawn for developing and organizing this brief essay. By probing my tentative titles, I can develop a
working thesis early on in the writing process. In my judgment, students wait too long to begin writing. Some
of the delay comes from their difficulty in finding or deciding on a thesis. Tentative titles allow students to find
not only one but several working theses, by which they can give focus to their essay writing early on. [See
Leahy (1992) for using titles to give focus during revision.]
Writing as Discovery
Listening to words, brainstorming and forming a focus are about learning – about discovering word
connections, one’s implicit opinions, various points of view, and working theses to be developed. Many
students conceive of essays as regurgitating others’ ideas, as parading facts based on authority. Such a
static conception of writing fuels procrastination. In getting students started on an essay right away by
composing titles first, student can find out through such exploration that writing itself is a discovery
process. They can experience writing as finding, organizing and making an argument. Write to Learn
(Donald Murray, 1998) represents a shift toward writing as a process of actively making sense of things.
Getting Engaged
Composing titles as a first stage in essay writing can elicit interest and evoke engagement. As part of my
composing an impromptu essay in class, I ask students in small discussion groups to write titles. They can
easily generate at least ten titles about a topic in three minutes. Not only do students enjoy doing it, they
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are pleased, even surprised, by some of their titles. When each group announces one title to the class,
students discover the diverse ways that a topic can be viewed. In small groups, students are also able to
draw out and articulate a thesis statement implied in a title. The playfulness of trying titles first can
engage us in the serious stuff of making sense through writing.
______________
Leahy, Richard. 1992. “Twenty Titles for the Writer.” College Composition and Communication 43/4
(December), 516-519.
Murray, Donald M. 1998. Write to Learn. 6th edition. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt College Publishers.
Safire, William and Leonard Safir.1992. Good Advice on Writing: Great Quotations from Writers Past
and Present on How to Write Well. New York: Simon and Schuster.
___________
A revised version of this paper appeared in Learning Through Writing. Revised edition. W. Alan
Wright, Eileen Herteis, Brad Abernethy (eds). 2001. Halifax: Dalhousie University.
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