Right now I'm visiting my parents, who have something very lethal that I don't: a television. A HUGE television. With a smorgasbord of channels and a DVR and I know this isn't impressive to most normal people but I am an INTELLECTUAL who doesn't own a television, all right? And what am I watching? "Intervention." Hilar.
Anyway. One of my former students, Jessica, requested some help with titling papers, and this is a worthwhile challenge. Because. I. HATE. Paper. Titles. Here is how most professional academic essays and books are titled:
"CLEVER, PROVOCATE QUOTE": Huge Jargon-Filled Run-on Hyphenate-addled "Sexy" Trend-Prostrating Stream of Horseshit and its Relation to a Very Obscure Book People Should Feel Inadequate for Not Having Ever Heard of Ever
This is more of a professional-scholar intervention at the outset, but I've started down this road and I'm like a geriatric who can't turn left and the only way off this road is a left, and so I'll say: THIS SHIT HAS GOT TO STOP, my homepeople. Nobody can understand titles like these. They are embarrassing to read. I am embarrassed on the behalf of all literate people when I read titles like these. I want to die and reincarnate myself as a self-destruct chip in all computers whose word-processing programs even START a title like this, so that any scholar who even types CLEVER QUOTE, COLON has his/her computer melt and then John Belushi's ghost comes into the room as Bluto Blutarsky going, "Sorry." And he's not really sorry. Because he saved everyone.
Ahem. All right. All this is just to say that I'm hardly the right person to be suggesting titles for anyone, since my own dissertation title is this:
In der Sprachkolonie: Franz Kafka's World and the Limits of Language
Sprachkolonie is a made-up word in German, a pun (on Strafkolonie, "penal colony," that means "language-colony") in a language I don't speak natively. It is embarrassing. I am embarrassed on its behalf, and now on yours for having read it. It makes me look like a chump. I'm currently in the process of turning the dissertation into a book, and let me tell you that book will have a much less stupid title, in a much less stupid format.
The first way in which to make it less stupid is to TAKE THE BULLSHIT BEFORE THE COLON AWAY. And then, obviously, the colon, though I guess it would be super-avant garde to start a paper with a colon. ": A Paper So Awesome it Doesn't Need a Clever Quote but Still Needs a Colon."
Why get rid of the bull before the colon? Well, because 99% likely, it is an inside joke with myself that I no longer even get. It offers nothing to anyone but the makers of Times New Roman, who get to see a few more characters of their precious font in print. It must die. It's fine to think of a clever title and a colon in your rough draft, but then once you want to submit the paper (and, presumably, its title) to any respectable authority, for the love of all that is holy take the way-too-inside joke and the colon and make it go away.
If I could retitle my dissertation, I'd call it something like this: Rediscovering Austrian Language Skepticism through Kafka and Wittgenstein. Is that unsexy? Yes. So boring you would never want to read it if you saw it on a shelf? Probably, but academic books are not designed to "pop" off the shelf. They are designed to pop up in other people's academic searches, and help those people by letting them know what in the everloving world they are about. They are not designed to be clever and cool. If you want to write things that are clever and cool, go into advertising.
Your title should be no longer than one line, and should, simply put, tell people what the eff your paper is about. Is your paper about gender roles in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night? Just call it "Exploring Gender Roles in Twelfth Night." You make the title interesting by adding a cool verb that makes the paper look alive and active. That makes it look way more alive and vibrant than any ridiculous CLEVER QUOTE COLON bullcrap ever could.
So a good formula is: [VERB DENOTING EXPLORATION OR AUTHORITY] + [YOUR ANGLE in the PAPER (see "one interesting idea")] + [YOUR SUBJECT]. "Investigating Language Politics in Karl Kraus's Vienna." "An Excavation of the Hidden Socialist Agenda in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged" (heh heh). "Making Sense of the Nonsensical Structure of Lewis Carroll." I guarantee you that this will end up serving you better than a CLEVER BULLSHIT COLON combination, and--perhaps even better--it will lessen the amount of rage in the world.
