We’re all headline writers now

When you’re confronted day after day by hundreds, if not thousands, of emails, tweets, status updates, blog posts and text messages, it’s amazing how skilful we become at weeding out the communications that deserve our attention. If we didn’t, we’d soon be completely overwhelmed. Assuming we don’t open each message, which would take forever, we only have two pieces of information on which to make our decision:

• the name of the sender
• the title given by the sender to the message

It is easy to filter out those messages which come from people that we have already decided don’t interest us or matter to us. Ideally we will make this a permanent situation by deleting these people from our Facebook friends, un-following them from Twitter, unsubscribing from their blogs, or assigning their emails to the junk folder.

That still leaves us with a lot of messages from sources that we value that we have to process in some way. We’re left with the email subject header, the blog post title or, in the case of tweets, text messages and status updates the bodies of the messages themselves.

Here’s where I think we’re all becoming skilled headline writers, or at least we should be. With emails and blog posts, our messages will never get read if the headlines are not sufficiently enticing. With tweets, SMS and status updates, all typically short messages, the message itself has to become a headline. If not, it will be scanned in a microsecond and quickly cast aside.

Need some tips?

How to write great headlines

How to write headlines that work

Headline writing for the web