When Writing Your Headlines, Be Clear, Not Clever

This was my biggest mistake as a newbie writer

A great writer once told me that I shouldn’t “ask for the readers’ trust before establishing it.” This is absolutely true.

He was kindly reviewing an article I wrote on which I had made a bold promise on the headline.

This is one of many details we must have in consideration when thinking about the perfect headline to our stories.

As a writer, you know how important headlines are because with thousands of stories “competing” for readers, a headline that grabs their attention is crucial.

But coming up with a good headline is very tricky, and when I started to write online I had one big problem that took me months to notice: I was trying to show how smart I was!

The Cleverness Fallacy

When writing our headlines we don’t want to make it too clickbaity, but we also don’t want it to be blunt, so we often think about a clever way to write it so it won’t reveal too much of the topic of the story; that way, we think, the reader will be curious and willing to see more of the story, but this is a huge mistake.

Unless you already have a considerable audience, your potential readers don’t want to waste mental bandwidth trying to figure out what you’re “offering” them to read.

They don’t know you well enough to know what to expect from your writing, not to mention that their mental process is backward from yours. Usually, you’ll write your story and then work on the headline, so a clever title will make sense to you and you’ll feel smart.

Your readers, however, don’t know what you’re talking about on your story and they will only see your headline, so it’s much harder for them to understand your “clever” word game. It’s not that they’re not as smarter as you, they just lack information, so most times they’ll skip your story and go to the next one, one that immediately tells them what they are about to read, so they know what they’re getting in exchange of their precious time.

The common consequence of this is that you’ll end up with a great story published, but hardly anyone will know about it!

I have published pieces that took me 10 plus hours to research, write and edit, and then I spent 5 minutes thinking about a “clever” headline. If instead of being clever I had tried to be assertive and clear, I’m sure those articles would have reached a much bigger audience.

On the other end, my most engaged story took me half an hour to write, and then I thought about an headline that clearly showed what I was about to talk, but that still incorporated a heavy emotional note, so I could grab the readers’ attention, specially of those who could relate with what I was experiencing.

Obviously the quality of the story is crucial for a good engagement, but the headline is what will invite your readers to come in and, if all goes well, to stay.

Be clear when offering your value proposition to your potential audience, trigger their curiosity but don’t let them in the dark guessing what your topic might be. Always remember that you have the advantage of knowing what’s your story about, your readers don’t, so what can make perfect sense to you might be confusing to them.

Don’t take unnecessary risks of condemning a great story to obscurity; put yourself on your audience shoes and figure out what they would think when seeing your headline, that will make you be much more closer to your readers and increase your possibilities of connecting with them.

If you want to read more about writing, have a look at these other stories.

• What I did to beat my insecurities and start sharing my work online:

• Writing is pointless if you have nothing to say. My thoughts about what makes us better at writing:

• The tools I use the most to help me writing my stories: