Week 12

One aspect of writing headlines that I wanted to touch on is the point that the Headlines should be worded differently than the leads.

I’ve always found this to be a little difficult. It’s funny because I can write a story just fine for the most part. All you’re really doing is just saying what’s going on, and you put the most important things first. But writing the leads and writing the headlines is just downright annoying.

It’s annoying because these two things do essentially the same thing. Each of them are a condensed version of the story that it precedes, and it gives the most important information. So, the lead is the most important info within about 25-30 words. But the Headline is even shorter than that.  I always thought it to be a little redundant to do that because you’re almost writing the same thing three times. One time really really short. The second time really short. And the third time is the full-length feature.

Learning how to get good at it just takes practice, basically like anything else you can think of. But it takes creativity and quite a bit of skill to make the headline intriguing, then getting to the lead and keeping that even more intriguing to get the readers to read the rest of the article.

It was something that I hated about the assignment, but also something that I appreciated it, because it taught me a lot and made me realize how creative a journalist needs to be every day even with the most mundane things happing.