Attention, please!

Are you a fellow blogger? Or did something else grab your notice here?

Let me confess that in playing creating titles for posts at the Red Barn, I’ve undergone a shift from the strict rules of writing newspaper headlines back when I was a professional journalist. For the record, I wrote hundreds of thousands of those, even while fixing the texts that followed or placing stories on the many pages I designed, all under a ticking clock and backlog.

One of the things I’ve discovered in blogging is that the title can stand on its own without having to quote from the text that follows. Instead, it can be a tease or even the first sentence of what then follows rather than a summary.

For another, it can be as long as I want. Not just up to ten counts or so of lettering on each of three lines, for example, which might turn out to be three to five words. Haiku looks easy in comparison. In blogging, the title might even be longer than the text that follows. Could you even summarize your post in a handful of words and still seduce readers? That was the newspaper challenge.

What we’re doing here seems all rather liberating or even lazy.

Not that it’s any less difficult.

Now, what grabs you next?