For academics and authors naming something is quite a responsibility, but one which we don’t always give the right sort of thought. Titles can be descriptive, provocative, thought-provoking, catchy, reliant on puns or zeitgeisty. However you think about it, it is how we market our work, whether we are naming our grand mangum opus (which sometimes the publishers get to name anyway) or a mere blog post. In two recent incidences I learned quite how important titles can be.
The first was the recent LASA conference in San Francisco. I came up with a title on the run, having carefully poured over the details of the proposal. I called it “Canonical Cannons: (Bi)Centenaries and Film Programming in Mexico and Argentina”. I blush on writing it down, I demurred when people asked what my talk was called so that they could look out for it on the programme. As a title it has good and bad in it. The “Canonical Cannons” bit is terrible. It’s a bad pun and makes reference to the idea of canon formation through the programming of commemorative film series that I spoke about in my presentation. It’s important to point out here that with LASA you get a book of titles, but not proposals, so my canonical bit actually seems to harp back to the debates about canon formation in the 90s, and therefore dates my presentation and not the more current idea of festivals and commemoration that it does address. Cannon is because I was talking about war/independence/Revolutionary films. Maybe too obvious. I obviously thought that the alliteration and play on words was clever. In hindsight, I would chose something else. The subtitle provides some insight into what the paper was about, which is useful and expands on what the Canonical Canon might have suggested. So, academic context is important, in other words being conscious of the academic jargon and trends when writing, but also, clarity is key.
The second incident was at LASA when I told someone, who was researching the Zapatistas, that I had written about Muertos incómodos, a novel co-written by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Isurgente Marcos. They hadn’t come across my article. I thought this through. This person was obviously a competent researcher, the journal is searchable, and I had thought that it was well-tagged. Then, coincidentally, someone yesterday contacted to say that they had been told about this article of mine and were asking which of my publications did this refer to. It’s called “From the City Looking Out, Out of the City Looking In”, which now, on reflection, I know to be an inadequate one. Whilst the article certainly address this City perspective on the countryside and how this is addressed in the novel, the title doesn’t say what work or authors it deals with. Again, I was trying to be clever and ended up hiding what I was doing.
The conclusion I reach in this is that it can be great to be creative and imaginative use of language can enhance our writing, however, in academia we must also inform. Tell the readership what we are doing. I do want my work read/listened to and to do that I must make sure that my titles are clear.