Once Again, More Headlines

These past couple of weeks writing headlines have been extremely difficult for me. I never understood the importance of writing headlines when you are a Public Relations major, because you will always have a journalist to write the story for you, right? Well, in my current PR internship, I am asked to write feature stories and come up with headlines! I remember asking my boss if we had a journalist who will cover the story and write it, and he told me that a Public Relations practitioner will almost always write his or her own story and come up with the headline.

Receiving this valuable information from my boss opened by eyes to a whole new perspective on writing headlines, and I have a greater appreciation for the assignments. None the less, it is still the hardest thing I have had to do in this class. 

 

One tip that I found to help me start writing the headline was Tip 11: The headline should be worded differently from the lead. I used this tip the most to help me come up with headlines. OK, the trick is to write the headline almost exactly like the lead making sure to use the correct format and number of words that is required. Then, once the headline and the lead are the same, you go through and change each word to use a different synonym. After you’ve done that, you go and rearrange the sentence using the same words to change the voice so that it does not sound the same as the lead.

I used this method to help me begin writing headlines and I think it helped me on the stories that were a little more difficult to understand. The trick doesn’t always work for every story, but I found it worked for most of them. 

Editing Mistake of the Week:

Clearly the word "parking" is misspelled. I can't believe someone actually created a nice and decent sign and couldn't tell it was spelled incorrectly. It even looks wrong!