1. Unit 2
Designing Titles
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2. Contents 2.1 Criteria for writing good titles 2.2 Types of titles
2.3 Capitalization in titles
2.4 Parallelism in sub-titles
2.5 Typical expressions used in titles
2.6 Chinese students’ common problems in designing titles
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3. 2.1 Criteria for writing good titles
The major title of a research paper (as opposed to titles of chapters or sections and subtitles of subsections) is of paramount importance. Why？
The title is indicative of the subject matter;
It may influence, to a certain degree, the decision as to whether the research paper will be read, accepted and published;
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4. 2.1 Criteria for writing good titles
According to Zeiger (1991: 305), the hallmarks of a good title are that
it accurately, completely, and specifically identifies the main topic or the main point of the paper,
is unambiguous,
is concise, and
begins with an important term.
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5. 2.1 Criteria for writing good titles
Is the following title good or bad?
The above example may serve as a good title, because it accurately and concisely portrays the research focus and is prefaced with a key term (i.e. evaluation)
Evaluation in Research Article Abstracts in the Narrative and Hard Sciences
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6. 2.1 Criteria for writing good titles
Discuss
Usually, the argument of the research paper is a good source for designing the title.
What is the easiest way to design research paper titles?
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7. 2.1 Criteria for writing good titles
Discuss
Though supposed to be accurate and specific, research article titles, more often than not, do not present a clear standpoint of their authors on the issue being discussed.
Do you think the authors of research papers, more often than not, indicate clearly their stance towards the subject being discussed?
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8. Contents 2.2 Types of titles 2.1 Criteria for writing good titles
2.3 Capitalization in titles
2.4 Parallelism in sub-titles
2.5 Typical expressions used in titles
2.6 Chinese students’ common problems in designing titles
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9. The Learning Styles and Strategies of Effective Language Learners
2.2 Types of titles
Discuss: what types do the following research paper titles fall into?
Pragmatics and SLA
The Learning Styles and Strategies of Effective Language Learners
Nominal construction
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10. Exploring Second Language Learners’ Notions of Idiomaticity
2.2 Types of titles
Discuss: what types do the following research paper titles fall into?
Exploring Second Language Learners’ Notions of Idiomaticity
Tracing the Fundamentalist in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Gerunds
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11. 2.2 Types of titles Prepositional phrases
Discuss: what types do the following research paper titles fall into?
On the Effects of Instruction in Second Language Pragmatics
From Lexical to Grammatical to Social Meaning
Prepositional phrases
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12. 2.2 Types of titles Compound titles
Discuss: what types do the following research paper titles fall into?
Perception vs. Evidence: An Analysis of This and These in Research Prose
Ethical Choice, Ethical Identity, and Ethical Consciousness: An Exploration of A Mercy from the Perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism
Compound titles
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13. 2.2 Types of titles Question titles
Discuss: what types do the following research paper titles fall into?
Do children have adult syntactic competence?
What Speaking Rates Do Non-native Listeners Prefer?
Question titles
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14. 2.3 Capitalization in titles
2.1 Criteria for writing good titles
2.2 Types of titles
2.3 Capitalization in titles
2.4 Parallelism in sub-titles
2.5 Typical expressions used in titles
2.6 Chinese students’ common problems in designing titles
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15. 2.3 Capitalization in titles
Some journals require the initial word (with no exceptions) and the subsequent words (except for articles, conjunctions and prepositions) in the title be capitalized.
On the Allusions in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
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16. 2.3 Capitalization in titles
In contrast, some other journals only demand the first word, whatever the part of speech it belongs to, of the title be capitalized.
A hybrid method for determining technical vocabulary
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17. Contents 2.4 Parallelism in sub-titles
2.1 Criteria for writing good titles
2.2 Types of titles
2.3 Capitalization in titles
2.4 Parallelism in sub-titles
2.5 Typical expressions used in titles
2.6 Chinese students’ common problems in designing titles
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18. 2.4 Parallelism in sub-titles
Generally speaking, sub-titles can be arranged in terms of their orientations or functions they fulfill.
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19. 2.4 Parallelism in sub-titles
The sub-titles can also be composed in accordance with the topic of each section, as indicate in (20).
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20. 2.4 Parallelism in sub-titles
The following sub-titles are ill-formed. How would you improve them?
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21. Contents 2.5 Typical expressions used in titles
2.1 Criteria for writing good titles
2.2 Types of titles
2.3 Capitalization in titles
2.4 Parallelism in sub-titles
2.5 Typical expressions used in titles
2.6 Chinese students’ common problems in designing titles
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22. 2.5 Typical expressions used in titles
The role of … in …
The influence of … on
The relationship between … and …
The effectiveness of … on …
A corpus-based study on
Effects of
Investigating …
A qualitative study of … ……
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23. Contents 2.6 Chinese students’ common problems in designing titles
2.1 Criteria for writing good titles
2.2 Types of titles
2.3 Capitalization in titles
2.4 Parallelism in sub-titles
2.5 Typical expressions used in titles
2.6 Chinese students’ common problems in designing titles
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24. 2.6 Chinese students’ common problems in designing titles
A. Too general
(30) Multi-media Technology and College English Teaching
B. Articles missing or wrongly used
(33) Pragmatic Analysis of Code-switching
C. Capitalization inaccurate or inconsistent
(35) A Comparative Study on the Use of Lexical Chunks Between English and Non-English Majors: A corpus-based study
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25. Check Your Understanding
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26. Check Your Understanding
1. Titles for research articles are usually based on the argument of the research.
2. Bare nominal constructions are frequently used in research article titles.
3. Compound titles, due to their inconsistency with the criterion of conciseness, should be avoided in research articles.
4. The initial letter of each word in research articles must all be capitalized.
5. The subtitles in a research paper are strongly recommended to employ the same syntactic structure with each other.
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27. In-Class Activities
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28. In-Class Activities: 1
1. The following research article titles are ill-formed in one way or another. Discuss these titles with your partner(s) and work out better ones.
a. The Impact of Emotion on English Learning in Middle School
b. Influences of Different Thought Patterns between Chinese and English on the Use of English Topic Sentence
c. A Study on Cyber Language
d. A Comparison on Lexical Chunks between English Majors’ Writing and Non-English Majors’ Writing
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29. In-Class Activities: 2
2. Compound titles, together with nominal constructions, are among the most frequently found types in research articles. Observe the following titles, and discuss the questions that follow:
a. Research Paper Titles in Literature, Linguistics and Science: Dimensions of Attraction (Journal of Pragmatics, 2004, 36: )
b. Writing Titles in Science: An Exploratory Study (English for Specific Purposes, 2007, 26: )
c. Do Language Learners Recognize Pragmatic Violations? Pragmatic vs. Grammatical Awareness in Instructed L2 Learning (TESOL Quarterly, 1998, 32: )
d. Forms of Address in French and Dutch: A Sociopragmatic Approach (Language Sciences, 1996, 3&4: )
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30. In-Class Activities: 2
e. Pandora’s Box: Research Perceptions of Student Plagiarism in Writing (Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2005, 4: )
f. Pragmatic Strategies in English as a Research Lingua Franca: Ways of Achieving Communicative Effectiveness? (Journal of Pragmatics, 2011, 43: )
g. Publishing and Learning Writing for Publication in English: Perspectives of NNES PhD Students in Science (Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2010, 9: )
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31. In-Class Activities: 2 ASK:
(1) What are the graphological features (like punctuation, capitalization, italicization, etc.) of those compound titles?
(2) What are the syntactic features of each component in those compound titles?
(3) What are the relations between the components in compound titles?
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32. In-Class Activities: 3
3. Different types of titles in research articles have different functions. Observe the following titles and then discuss the questions that follow.
a. Does Grammaticaliztion Need Reanalysis? (Studies in Language, 1998, 22: )
b. Perception and Control: A Minimalist Analysis of English Direct Perception Complements (Journal of Linguistics, 1998, 34: )
c. The Study of Imperative Usage in Biblical Hebrew and English (Studies in Language, 1998, 22: )
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33. In-Class Activities: 3 ASK: (1) What type does each title belong to?
(2) In contrast with Title b and c, what is/are the advantage(s) of the first one? Does it have any disadvantages?
(3) As for the second title, what is the function of the first part, i.e. the part before the colon? Why does the author employ the second part?
(4) How do you think of the third title? Is it well-drafted? State the reasons for your judgment.
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34. In-Class Activities: 4
4. The title, as mentioned earlier, is indicative of the research subject of the research paper, and can be figured out from the corresponding abstract. Read the following abstract and then discuss the questions that follow.
In the last few decades, the interpersonal nature of academic communication has been stressed in English for Academic Purposes literature. Taking metadiscourse as the analytical framework, this paper focuses on the cross-cultural analysis of interpersonally driven features in research article writing in a single discipline, Business Management. It aims at analyzing to what extent the different contexts (i.e. the US international and the Spanish national) influence the strategic use of metadiscourse features in this discipline.
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35. In-Class Activities: 4
The analysis is based on a corpus of 24 research articles from this discipline: 12 of them written in English by scholars based at North-American institutions and published in international journals, and another 12 written in Spanish by Spanish scholars and published in national journals. Significant differences are reported on the overall frequency of metadiscourse features as well as on the particular incidence of some categories in the two sub-corpora. The particular linguistic/cultural contexts of publication seem to influence scholars’ rhetorical choices when writing their research articles. New knowledge appears to be interpersonally negotiated in different terms in research articles in the two cultural contexts within this disciplinary domain.
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36. In-Class Activities: 4 ASK:
(1) Which term appears more frequently than others in this abstract? What does this tell you?
(2) What title can you think out for this research paper according to this abstract?
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37. In-Class Activities: 4
(3) What problems are there in the writing of the following titles based on this abstract?
a. Metadiscourse in English and Spain
b. The Study of Metadiscourse in English and Spain
c. Contexts for Metadiscourse in Research Articles
d. The Use of Metadiscourse Features in Research Articles in English and Spain
e. An Intercultural Analysis of Metadisourse Features in Research Articles in English and Spain
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38. In-Class Activities: 5
5. The following are the title and subtitles of a graduation thesis. Observe them carefully, and discuss the questions that follow.
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40. In-Class Activities: 5 ASK:
(1) What do you think of the title of the graduation thesis? Does it conform to the criteria that you read in Section 2.1? If not, please supply a better one.
(2) Are the sub-titles of the chapters syntactically parallel to each other? If not, how would you improve them?
(3) The author of this thesis divides Chapter One into three sections. Are they well categorized? Is there any overlapping across the three sections?
(4) Chapter Three consists of three sections. Are the subtitles parallel to each other? If not, how would you improve them?
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42. Post-Class Tasks
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43. Post-Class Tasks: 1
What criteria do good research article titles follow? Collect five problematic English titles from the journals published in China (most Chinese journals require corresponding English titles) and discuss why they fail to meet these standards. Improve them as you think fit.
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44. Post-Class Tasks: 2
The following is a research article abstract drafted by a Chinese learner of English. What do you think of the title? Does it meet all the requirements of composing titles? If not, how would you improve it?
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46. Post-Class Tasks: 3
The following is taken from the Table of Contents from an MA candidate. How do you think of the sub-titles of this chapter? How would you improve them?
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48. Post-Class Tasks: 4
The following is an abstract taken from Foreign Literature Studies (2011, 1: 42-47). What title can you think out from this abstract? Tell us the reason(s) for your choice.
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50. Project Work
It is found that research article titles in different disciplines of study tend to use different grammatical categories, such as noun phrases, prepositional phrases, full sentences, etc. Read some English journals on linguistics, literature and science, and then work out their respective conventions in composing titles.
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51. The End
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