Staccato Yelps

A piece from my first copy-editing textbook.

From Lynn Ludlow, "The Unappreciated Art of Writing Headlines," in Bowles, Borden and Rivers, Creative Editing for Print Media (1993), p. 176f.:

The headline itself is considered an American invention. It came after centuries when newspapers were festooned instead with captions, the term used for static labels or headings. Present-tense verbs burst into headlines near the end of the 19th century, when the new-fangled rotary press brought mass circulation dailies into urgent competition for readers.

Editors began to talk of banners, screamers, skylines, ribbons, wrap-arounds, snappers, kickers and eyebrows. Headlines were staggered, hung, stepped, indented, centered, boxed or shaped like a V. The language of headlines was shorn of auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, prepositions [?] and articles. Verbs, ignored in caption days, became queens. As nouveau royalty, predicates began to kill off their subjects. Consider the Chicago Tribune's screamer of April 11, 1951: "FIRES GEN. M'ARTHUR."

The copy editor's language favored staccato yelps: rap, pit, foe, rid, tie, cap, pry, ebb, cut, nip, nab, vow, rip, set, din, bid, aid, jar, try, act, rid, aim, fix, due, ban, jam, row, etc. Perhaps a student of general semantics will someday attempt to analyze the subconscious effects on generations of newspaper readers assaulted each day with a headline vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon terms chosen for brevity and violent impact: fray, whip, rout, stun, raid, curb, howl, lash, spur, rout, slap, slash.

Strangely, considering that copy editors live by the printed word, the lore of headline writing is passed down from one generation to the next by way of oral guidelines, mostly negative, mostly barked.

No, says the dealer, I never want to see set used again in this paper; it makes it too easy.

No, don't write heads with acronyms unless the story is about acronyms (in the Seattle Times: "You CETA Words but They Have NOOA Meaning.").

No, don't use overworked pun ploys ("Jane is Fonda exercise").

No, may is unacceptable; someday, pigs "may" fly.

No, avoid abbreviations. No, avoid officialese. No, avoid jargon. No, avoid cliches.

Note: I don't know why "rout" is used twice in the third paragraph.