The Best Headlines: Short and Simple
Writers suck at headline writing, new research reveals, and I'm here to help you improve yours.
This is a special edition of the Writer’s Guide, with the unusual impetus of new research that’s invaluable to writers. Oh, and an offer below for personalized headline help.
A headline has one goal: Get people to read the story. Sure, it must also be accurate and honest, a promise to be fulfilled, but those are best practices. And yes, a headline should be clear and concise, and it might even be creative. Those are strategies and tactics. But the goal of a headline, its purpose, its job, is to sell the story. End of story.
There is no one right way to craft a headline. Long, clever headlines can be fun and effective. But long headlines can lose focus, and cleverness can obfuscate meaning. Your potential readers are busy people, and time is a precious commodity, so you need to know what the point of your story is and get to it.
Or: Write short and simple headlines.
It’s age-old advice in journalism and media: Extra words, complex terms and any sort of puffery just gets in the way. And it’s advice that writers frequently ignore, partly because they don’t see headlines the same way readers do. In short: Writers are often lousy headline writers.
New research out today proves all this to be true.
Real-world tests
Online experiments conducted by The Washington Post and, separately, by the less newsy site Upworthy find that readers pay more attention to simple headlines that use common language, and they click on those more often than more complex headlines.
A whopping 30,000 A/B experiments, in which audiences were served either of two different headlines (A or B), were reviewed by outside researchers who were granted access to each company’s tests.
Simpler headlines were selected more often—69.4% of the time—compared to complex versions (30.6%). As a follow-up in some of the tests, readers were asked if they remembered a three-word phrase from the headlines they’d seen. Recall was more accurate for the simpler headlines.
“This suggests that people allocate more attention to simple texts than they do to complex texts,” said Hillary Shulman, lead author of the study and an associate professor of communication at Ohio State University.
The results of the uber-analysis are published today in the journal Science Advances.
Short is smart, too
When writers struggle with a headline—and we often do—it’s either because the story is poorly focused or, if the story is good, then because we have the whole story in our heads, and we tend to want to tell it all.
When a story doesn’t want to give up its headline, when the writer is stuck, I often offer this simple suggestion:
Limit Headlines to Five Words
Whittling a headline down to bare bones, by limiting the word count, forces a reckoning of the story’s crux while also cultivating clear, simple wording. If you can’t come up with a workable headline in five words or less, either your story has serious problems or you’re overthinking the headline. This is not to say the best headline will always be five words or less, only that you should be able to craft a pithy one that works, and it’ll often be the best one.
Among the other best practices I advise:
Offer up a subject and verb, often an object, perhaps an adjective. Nix any other words that aren’t doing some heavy lifting (examples: a, and, the).
Avoid unfamiliar words, jargon and obscure concepts.
Be definitive: clear and concrete.
Write in active voice (avoid “ing” words)
Example of active vs. passive voice:
Man Bites Dog (active)
Dog Bitten by Man (passive)
Siberian Husky Bitten by Pennsylvania Resident Who Claims He Was Bitten First (TMI)
Yes, yes, it’s not always possible or practical to do it in five words or less. Fine. Can you do it in six? How about seven? If you need more than seven words, it better be an amazing headline, and easy to read. Are you capable of that? Did you try a shorter version? Did you run it by anyone to see if it works before publishing?
I’ve always known intuitively that concise, clear and concrete headlines can be the most compelling and effective. I’ve seen it in data on the most popular articles on numerous websites I’ve been in charge of, from science to technology to business. My take is supported by eye-tracking showing that when looking for something to digest, people often scan more than they read, looking for key words and concepts that might interest them. Eye-tracking studies by the Poynter Institute, dating back to the print days of newspapers and more recently online, confirm that people prefer straightforward headlines over attempts to be funny or cute.
The more words you pack into a headline, and the cleverer you try to be, the more work you’re asking a potential reader to do, and readers don’t like work. There’s always another headline just a glance away.
The (limited) case for longer headlines
The new analysis of the A/B tests did not suggest headlines must be short to be effective. Simplicity and clarity matter most, with—per my advice—brevity being one way to achieve both. Here’s one example from the study of a long headline that did poorly with readers (A) compared to a longer one that did better, thanks to simpler wording and construction (B):
A) Are Meghan and Harry spilling royal tea to Oprah? Don’t bet on it.
B) Meghan and Harry are talking to Oprah. Here’s why they shouldn’t say too much
Because the Post is a serious news site, and Upworthy not so much, the fact that A/B tests on both sites yielded similar results suggest a universal appeal of straightforwardness and clarity, the researchers concluded.
“This result lends credence to the idea that the appeal of simple headlines is a general habit for casual readers,” Shulman said in a statement.
“Small efforts aimed at increasing the simplicity or fluency of language can increase the attention of casual readers — and also make them more informed and educated about the news of the day,” said study team member David Markowitz, an associate professor of communication at Michigan State University.
I can hear some of you groaning about dumbing things down or dabbling in clickbait. That’s absolutely not what the research suggests. Simple is not the same stupid. Successful does not equate to disingenuous. Headlines must be honest. They must be supported by the story. Nobody should be tricked.
“The Washington Post doesn’t have to turn into clickbait,” Shulman said, “but we have to acknowledge that the average user has thousands and thousands of choices of what to read—and they prefer simpler writing.”
Also note that the new research and the overall strategies and tactics discussed in this article pertain to news and feature stories in publications and associated social media, where readers are scrolling or scanning and deciding whether to click on a particular story. Headline strategies can vary significantly if the goal is, say, SEO optimization for a reference article, where one aims to have the articles rank well in search.
Simple does not mean boring
If you write for a niche audience or a highly sophisticated group of readers, you might have more license to stray from simplicity. But I’d argue unless you are really good at headline writing, the potential risk is rarely worth the reward.
Consider the platform Medium, for example, which has 1 million paying subscribers and is singularly devoted to the experience of reading good stories (not news briefs or clickbait). The content overseers there have repeatedly sung the praises of short, clear headlines. In a Zoom meeting with Medium publishers that I attended earlier this year, the message was simple, and based on the platform’s data:
Headlines should be clear and engaging, and usually they should be short. Clever is good, so long as clarity is not compromised.
And above all else, headlines must be alluring. They need punch. After all, your story is phenomenal, right? So should be the headline. Here’s a headline this week. from The New York Times, that practically wrote itself:
Pretty good, right? I couldn’t help wondering, though, what an A/B test might reveal if Option B read like this:
‘Dead’ Woman Found Alive at Funeral Home
That’s seven words vs. nine. Only two fewer words, but I pulled another bit of magic out of my Headline Writing Tricks box, one that I repeat repeatedly to my writers:
Get your most important words up front. The old eye-tracking research showed that people key in on the first words of any bit of text: a headline, a subtitle, a caption, a sentence, a paragraph. So make those first words count. Dead Woman… is more compelling (IMO) than Woman Declared….
It’s a fine point, but we writers should be about nothing if not fine points.
If you lean toward long headlines, also beware that in teasers showing up on various publishing platforms and social media apps, long headlines are often truncated. Many potential readers won’t see your entire headline masterpiece. Best to make those first few words compelling on their own.
Sorry, but you probably suck at headline writing
You might think that because you’re a writer, you’re ideally suited to write headlines. Oh, the cognitive bias runs strong in us writers!
In the new study, Shulman and her colleagues repeated some of the A/B tests with journalists and other professional writers. Unlike the general reader population, simplicity had no effect on which headlines these “experts” clicked on, nor their recollections of the three-word phrases in the headlines. And here’s the kicker: These writers were then asked which of the headlines they figured readers would prefer most and — you guessed it — they failed.
The writers were flat wrong about what readers prefer.
“Journalists may not be the best suited to write headlines because they seem to read differently than the general public,” Shulman said.
And that, dear writers, is one reason I harp on short headlines. It’s hard to go wrong when you keep it short and simple. Crafting a short headline forces you to zero in on the crux of your story, and in today’s busy world with its flood of headlines, getting to the point is the best way to ensure your headline does its job.
Cheers,
Rob
PS: Here’s some more news, with a helpful five-word headline:
How to Get Headline Help
Wouldn’t it be cool if you had an editor to help you with headlines? I can be that editor. Become a paid subscriber to the Writer’s Guide now and I’ll volunteer as your headline helper. Existing paid subscribers, plus anyone who levels up this month, are invited to run any stories by me for headline brainstorming through the end of 2024. What’ve you got to lose, other than readers?
That was very nice. I did not think this way. Now I will spend more time to curate my heading definately.
Now I know why I suck at headlines -- Journalism school!