Struggles of Headlines

The struggle to capture the entire essence of a story in a headline is something I learned this week. The headline has to be precise, concise and attention grabbing. Using strong verbs is essential to capturing the reader's attention, and keeping the headline clutter free is also required. If a headline doesn't use those things or have those things then it flounders on the paper and is ignored by readers. I write headlines by truncating the main elements of a story into a few words that describes most without telling all. This way the reader knows what the premise of a story is about, but still has to read the lead to absorb all the information within. I also learned how to find good headlines. Finding good headlines is much easier than making them. But newspapers and online sources are littered with great headlines, and until this week I took it for granted. Although, it's easy to find terribly written headlines. An editing mistake I found this week was on an old Idaho Magazine I browsed through on accident. An article read, "They toke the bike uphill." Toke is supposed to be took, in case you missed it.