The Psychology Behind Captivating Writing Headlines or Titles
How to draw the reader in
Have you ever paid attention to why you decided to read a story? The most popular answer I bet would be the headline or title.
Research has found that readers usually decide whether it is worth their time to read a story through headlines or titles. As writers, crafting an accurate and catchy title is half the battle.
Truth is, valuable content gets buried in boring non-engaging titles so developing this skill is important.
But what must a title deliver? Well, two things essentially.
- Interest/captivate the reader
- Inform the reader and introduce the subject of the article.
I will like to dwell on the first bit about interest and captivation and the psychology behind it.
So What Is the Psychology Behind Captivating Headlines?
Psychologists and linguists in an attempt to understand what works in drawing in the reader found what they call the curiosity or information gap — something click bait new outlets use to their advantage.
A headline or title that invokes curiosity motivates a curious individual to obtain the information he considers missing in an attempt to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.
According to Loewenstein(a behavioural economist) , stimuli like riddles, puzzles, events or sequences with unknown outcomes, expectation violations, information possessed by others, or forgotten information spark curiosity and moves the individual to obtain the information he considers of value.
As writers, the skill is to delicately balance curiosity and the value proposition without giving everything away.
So what are some of the ways to craft captivating titles?
When it comes to captivating titles we can learn a thing or two from the click bait handbook. This is because they do a good job at getting people interested and learning how to be effective from an “enemy or foe” is considered wise. So a few things:
1. The Use of “How, What, Why….”
Take a quick look at some of the best and engaging writing pieces here on Medium and I bet more the 50% will have used one of these words.These words carry with them a value proposition and seek to give an answer to something.Incorporating one of these into a title undoubtedly invokes some level of curiosity.
2. Listicles …Listicles
These are a favorite here on Medium; I can understand why. From a psychological viewpoint, listicles give us the promise of cutting to the chase and condensing the key message into discrete chunks without having to read the entire writing.
Consider a title like “7 Reasons Why You Are Not a Millionaire”. The human curiosity endeavors to find out if all the reasons are known or simply to validate what we already know. Either way, we are more inclined to read the piece rather than ignore it if the subject is something we’re interested in.
3. Strong Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives
If you want to convey authority and appear to know what you are writing about strong verbs and adjectives send a positive signal. Such words include powerful, irrefutable, best, amazing, important etc.
4. Lengthy Headlines
Academic research on click-bait and conventional non-click-bait find that the former was more lengthy. For example, the average length of the click bait headlines is 10, whereas the average length is 7 for non-click bait headlines.
I believe some articles that sought to dissect other articles that do well on Medium found some correlation between successful pieces and lengthy headlines or titles. Note however, that correlation is not causation.
Another word of advice: writing longer titles for the sake of it is not smart but do bear this in mind the advantages if you need a longer headline to convey your message
In Summary
Your title or headline is your first impression. Make it count. If you find any writing piece that draws your attention, take some time to get to know why and inculcate it into later writing. That’s how to become better writer.
At The Writing Cooperative, our mission is to help each other write better. We’ve teamed up with ProWritingAid to do just that. Try it for free!
