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Creative and Descriptive Titles

Creative: Descriptive

The convention of making titles

  • Concerning titles to your paper/poster/presentation, we are going to follow a standard tradition in academic writing.
  • Titles are in two parts
    • A Creative part (The main title)
    • A Descriptive part (The subtitle)
  • The CREATIVE part is usually witty, or a play on words, or a quote from the subject (such as from a film you are researching)
  • The DESCRIPTIVE part is a fragment of your thesis, which tells the reader what the central idea of the research is.

Examples

  • See if you can determine what these papers are about by just reading the creative part of the titles.
    • “There is More Than One Kind of freedom …Freedom to and freedom from”
    • "I’m Sorry, Laura, I Don’t Understand the Question"
    • Cracks in The Story
    • Barbie Meets Fiona
  • Now notice how boring these papers seem to be with just their subtitles
    • Conflicting Discourses of Beauty in Sci-fi Films.
    • The Trace of Counter-Intuitive Pessimism in UBI/AI Stories of Humans, Westworld, The Expanse, and Star Trek.
    • Cultural Tightness in The Handmaid’s Tale, The Walking Dead, and The Rain.
    • Post-apocalyptic Verisimilitude of Nature in The Last of Us and Shannara.
  • With both the Creative title and the descriptive title, we have an interesting title, and then a subtitle to give us the gist of the research.
    • "There is More Than One Kind of freedom …Freedom to and freedom from": Cultural Tightness in The Handmaid’s Tale, The Walking Dead, and The Rain.
    • "I’m Sorry, Laura, I Don’t Understand the Question": The Trace of Counter-Intuitive Pessimism in UBI/AI Stories of Humans, Westworld, The Expanse, and Star Trek.
    • Cracks in The Story: Post-apocalyptic Verisimilitude of Nature in The Last of Us and Shannara.
    • Barbie Meets Fiona: Conflicting Discourses of Beauty in Sci-fi Films.

For your class...

  • For Composition 1, your descriptive subtitle of the MLA paper/APA paper/pitchdeck must name your subject and your theory.
    • Problems in the Community of Animal Rights.
    • Analysing Youth Coaching through Social Exchange.
  • For the Main Creative title, that's up to you to create.
  • For Composition 2, everyone's descriptive subtitles will be very broad and very similar. Examples:
    • Using multiple theories to analyse Film Title
    • Understanding Film Title through the multiple lenses of many theories.
    • Exploring the depth of Film Title through a variety of theories.
  • For Composition 2, you will have to decide your Creative Main title.
  • For Humanities courses:
    • Good luck!