Learning to Headline

I really enjoyed learning more about headlines.  To me, they have always seemed to be very straightforward and not required anything other than coming up with a catchy phrase or idea.  This week’s PowerPoint presentation really helped me fine tune my headline writing capabilities, as well as understand the different rules to writing headlines. 

            One thing that I think I have always noticed but never thought about is the rule to never use the past tense in a headline.  While doing the homework, I found it hard to follow this rule at certain times.  Another great thing that I learned that I wasn’t aware of is that a comma can be used to replace the word “and.”  I have seen headlines written all the time where they didn't make sense because of the comma, but now I get it and actually understand them.  I also didn’t know that you needed to use single quotation marks in order to save space and also to simplify.  The last thing that I found useful to understand is that there are two styles: upstyle and downstyle.  I never knew whether to capitalize everything or not.  I learned that there simply are just two different styles. 

            This week’s error was very funny to me.  The article talks about Tyra Banks’ new suspenders style.  It referred to them as “high-wasted pants.”  To me this means that her pants are drugged up and drunk.  The correct spelling would be “waist”, not “waste.”