Headlines and parts of speech
Here’s one quick way to tell if the headline you just wrote might be confusing: Is it full of words with multiple meanings, or words that can function as multiple parts of speech?
For example, a Michigan daily from a neighboring county once ran this headline on its front page:
Leaves short sheriff
Which left me with two questions:
1) Who, exactly, left the sheriff?
2) Why do we care that the sheriff is short?
Turns out the story was actually about the fact that a high number of deputies were on leave, which resulted in the sheriff being short-handed. But since “leaves” is much more commonly used as a verb than a noun, and “short” is much more commonly used as an adjective than a verb, the end result was confusing.
Another example, from a daily in Iowa:
Blow eyes fine fund
This headline is especially interesting in that every single word in it can function as at least two separate parts of speech, and in some cases three. The story was really about a city official named Blow who wanted to take a pot of money generated from fines collected by the city and use it for one purpose or another.
I’ll concede that in one respect, both of these headlines did their job. They got me to read the story, or at least the subhead, because I wanted to find out what on earth they were talking about. But consistently making your readers say “What the heck does that mean?” is usually not a winning proposition for a newspaper.
In the interest of full disclosure, I once wrote one of these headlines myself. It was after someone stole about $10,000 worth of wine from a local restaurant, and the headline read:
Wine heist nets haul
Was it accurate? Yes. Was there any other way to describe the story in a one-column head using 48-point type? Probably not. And, yes, I admit I was pretty proud of the headline for that very reason. But on the clarity front, it probably left something to be desired.