Copywriting - How to Write Great Headlines?

Here is one time-tested venerable principle: make sure that your verb is somehow organically related to the defining characteristics of the sentence's subject; but it should be used in a DIFFERENT context.

Business summaries aired on National Public Radio use this technique all the time:

"Green Tech stocks sprouted two percent... Waste Central share prices trashed by bad news... Bluesky Airline shares took off by nine percent today... "

Take this great headline by the New York Times (June 13, 2007 ):

"Casinos Go All In To Draw Asians" ... Perfect!

"Going all in" is a poker term and represents a situation in which a player risks everything. The writer could have said "Casinos Pull All Stops To Draw Asians"... or "Casinos Risk It All To Draw Asians" but it would not be the same. It would not have the same punch and the same juice.

Here the action phrase "going all in" is perfectly related to the "casinos." It is also used not in its traditional context of poker but in a new context of marketing. That unexpected cognitive shift injects power to the expression while still closely keeping our attention riveted to the gambling framework.

This technique is almost like the linguistic equivalent of taking a familiar object and making an interesting statue out of it, like the way Picasso created a cow's head from a bicycle seat.

In fine arts, the technique primarily shakes us out of our daily complacency, expands the doors of perception, and amuses us by revealing the design parallels between totally unrelated objects.

In creating power headlines, however, the parallelism between divergent usages not only breaks the mold of our established conventions (and again amuses us) but it also delivers some useful information as well, usually with high retention rates.

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Ugur Akinci is a senior writer with 20 years of experience.

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