The Impaakt Team
8 min Read Time | February 16th 2022
Key Takeaways
Headlines are not meant to be vague or to hide key pieces of information.
Readers should know in 5 seconds what the article is about and should be convinced that your analysis is worth reading (and rating!).
Think about media articles, what is going to entice you to read them? Great headlines have that power.
Below are some best practices you can follow to write an engaging headline that will make your analysis stand out.
A headline should respect the same editorial standards as the analysis (this is covered in Step 6: Use the right standards).
One recurring mistake we see is writers using CAPITAL LETTERS or putting Capital Letters at the Beginning of Each Word, which should be avoided.
This structure is the most effective to summarise the core of your analysis.
Let’s take a look at a few good headlines following this pattern:
Casio supports math education through its calculators, reaching 25Mn students each year
Pola Orbis consumed 218,365 m3 of water in 2021
Through training and microloans, Nestlé supports the livelihoods +500k farmers in its supply chain
1/ Avoid putting the targets, commitments, or intentions of the company or relative metrics, as these may be misleading. For instance, you should not write:
2/ Avoid using relative comparisons in the headline. Absolute numbers suffice. It should be very straightforward.
You will have noticed that each of the above headlines feature either:
Without these, your headline will remain unclear.
See the headlines below, do they tell you exactly what kind of impact the author is analysing?
Not really, right?
To strengthen your headline, you need to wait until your analysis is finished, and then identify your most important metric:
If the impact described is focused on a certain area or period, it is a good practice to mention these.
For dates, we recommend putting it towards the end, but different formats can be used. A few examples :
As for location, there are different ways to go about it. You can either talk about the nationality of the people affected or specify the country. See below :
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