Write your title last - Writing your final introduction and conclusion - Research and writing

A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, Ninth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2018

Write your title last
Writing your final introduction and conclusion
Research and writing

Your title is the first thing your readers read, but it should be the last thing you write. It should both announce your topic and communicate its conceptual framework, so build it out of the key terms that you earlier identified (review 9.3). Compare these three titles:

✵ Risk

✵ Thinking about Risk

✵ Irrational but Systematic Risk Assessment: The Role of Visual Imagination in Calculating Relative Risk

The first title is accurate but too general to give us much guidance about what is to come. The second is a bit more specific, but the third uses both a title and a subtitle to give us advance notice of the paper’s key terms. When readers see the key terms from the introduction turn up throughout a paper, they are more likely to think it coheres, or holds together. Two-part titles—a main title followed by a subtitle—give you more room for key terms.