Write your title last - Writing your final introduction and conclusion - Writing your paper

Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010

Write your title last
Writing your final introduction and conclusion
Writing your paper

Your title is the first thing your readers read; it should be the last thing you write. It should both announce the topic of your paper and signal its important concepts, so build it out of the key terms that you earlier circled and underlined. Compare these three titles:

Bingeing

Ignoring the Risks of Bingeing

A Story is Worth a Thousand Facts:

Why Binge Drinkers Overestimate Its Prevalence and Underestimate Its Risks

The first title is accurate but too general to help us through what is to come. The second is more specific, but the third uses both a title and subtitle to give us advance notice about the keywords that will appear in what follows. When we see the keywords in a title turn up again in an introduction and then again throughout the paper, we're more likely to feel that its parts hang together. Two-part titles are most useful: they give you an opportunity to use your keywords to announce your key concepts.