George Bernard Shaw

It may seem trivial to tell you to choose a good title for your next written work, but importance of this task should not be underestimated. A good title may be difference between a reader choosing to look at your work or passing over it.

Many readers will learn of your work while surrounded by other documents that are competing for their attention. For example, they may see it while:

* scanning printed documents on a bookshelf;

* looking through titles in a printed index;

* looking at a bound collection of documents; or

* searching Internet.

A good title can help your work to stand out from crowd. Here then are some guidelines for choosing a good title.

TITLE GUIDELINE ONE

USE THE FEWEST NUMBER OF WORDS THAT EXPRESS WHAT YOU WISH TO SAY

When choosing a title, avoid generic phrases like 'An investigation of...', 'A study into...' and 'Observations on...'. These are implied anyway and add little value.

Compare these two titles:

A study of effects of chaos as a source of complexity and diversity in evolutionary processes

Chaos as a source of complexity and diversity in evolution

The first title takes seventeen words, second one ten. The first one contains extra words that convey slightly more information (study, effects and processes) but at cost of making title notably longer and less memorable.

Here is another example:

A description of a variety of different tools for creating an interactive virtual-cinema environment

Tools for interactive virtual cinema

The first title clearly employs more words than are needed (fourteen versus five). It does contain more information, but at cost of being wordier, harder to remember and burying key words at end of sentence.

Here are 7 reasons why writing articles really works:

1. Writing articles is free marketing. You write your article and post it to a number of article resource sites. Then, ezine owners pick up your article and feature it in their ezine. All of this costs you nothing and you get free marketing.

2. The more articles you write, more you become an expert in your field. Experts get featured a lot more widely.

3. By having lots of articles on lots of web sites around world, you automatically rank above average on search engines because of your link popularity. All those links in resource box back to your site can make a big difference in search engine ranking.