Legal Writing

Words you see only in headlines

By Pam_Nelson

I am a copy editor, and as part of that job, I write headlines. Last week, I wrote this headline, using a word that we rarely see except in headlines.

I wasn't happy with this headline. But I wanted to be sure to get "Tax preparer" into the head because those are the keywords that would be picked up in a search engine on the Web and because, with the deadline for filing our tax returns bearing down, these are the words that would attract the eyes of human readers in the print edition. Once those words were in the headline, I didn't have much room for a verb. "Denounced," a word you might actually use in real life, was too long. So I settled on "decried." Given more time and a fresher brain, I might have come up with a different take on the head altogether. 

I was heartened the next day when I checked our Web site and saw that "Tax preparer's fees decried" was among the top stories on the site. I guess "decried" didn't stop readers from clicking on it. 

Other words that headline writers have been known to turn to when the space is tight: eye (for "looks out"), irk (for the verbs "anger" or "annoy"), nix (for "say no to" or "reject") and eke (for "squeeze out").

(Variety, the show business newspaper, is well-known for its funny headline words such as boffo for "successful" and probably derived from "box office" and pix for "pictures.)

We avoid these words these days. The prevailing view of headlines is that they should be written as close to natural writing as possible. We try to distill the news or the most important angle of the story and put that into a sentence with a subject and a verb and with all the other words that will get the meaning across. Still, newspaper headlines have to fit in the space allowed by the layout of the page. So sometimes we have to fall back on words that we seldom use anywhere else. 

Full post as published by Triangle Grammar Guide on April 17, 2010 (boomark / email).