People with kids in elementary school may be familiar with kidbiz. This platform human interest stories into digestible articles pitched at differentiated reading levels. Students read assigned articles and then answer eight questions.
My own child consistently stumbled at one of the stock questions, “what is the main idea of this article?” The question was multiple choice, and he sensed possibility in each answer.
“Just look at the title,” I suggested one evening. I was stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce or cleaning the dishes. I just tossed the idea over my shoulder, a pinch of salt.
Ding! Success!
Once he linked the title and the main idea, he never looked back. In fact, he never read another article, much to my dismay. He looked at the title, skipped to the questions, and achieved a passing score, 75%. I could hear the dings and the bells in the background, and he would proudly pump his fist in the air and declare victory. He had cracked the kidbiz code.
Cracking the Code
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of cracking the code but not for the same reason as my child. His dubious success simply underscores the simple fact that titles matter. And in academic writing, subtitles matter, too, but more on that later.
When I relayed the story to a colleague, she picked up the idea and ran with it. Soon she and her co-authors would tease each other, “does your title pass the kidbiz test?”
My students, on the other hand, see titles are extraneous, a few words strung together to replace “Essay Number 1” before submission. But titles guide the writer while writing just as they guide the reader while reading. For the writer, titles are not north stars or fixed constellations but bundles of words that can be pulled apart and reordered, their status provisional. They serve as wayfinding devices; we navigate our ideas, even while we recognize our paths may change.
Portable Concepts
A master of titling is award-winning scholar James Scott and author of Weapons of the Weak, Thinking like a State, and Against the Grain, among others. His titles are evocative because they work at the level of the concept. Those titles have been elevated to working concepts in the social sciences. His titles are exemplary of what Eric Hayot calls “portable concepts” in Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities. An effective title, Hayot suggests, identifies such a “portable concept” that encompasses not just the book’s chapters but also points beyond, creating a “beautiful circuit that the reader carries away from the book” (p. 145). Such portability moves across the chapters, providing a thread to tie them together, but also names “a rhetorical structure for grasping and talking about the ideas in the book.”
Hayot advises academic writers to play with the tried-and-true formula of titles often an evocative title followed by a colon and a subtitle. Subtitles specify or particularize the subject matter—the who, where, when of the content. He remains skeptical of strategies that invoke a quotation for the writer understands their import, but the reader does not.
Not Your Title, but the Reader’s
Titles, it turns out, are a lot of work. Even more so when the title becomes partly owned by marketing and publicity teams. Courtney Maum, author of Before and After the Book Deal, describes the moment as “when your title’s not your title.”
I found that to be true when batting about suggestions for my first two books. Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City was not its original title. I think it was something like “Open Doors,” and the production team roundly and rightly rejected. There were other books, wholly unrelated, with the same title. In other words, the title did not do the work of particularizing the book. It would merely confuse keyword searches by pointing in too many directions.
I used a brainstorming strategy that is useful whenever I need to generate alternatives, but quick. Could I come up with twenty alternatives? I can usually think of 8 titles, often variations on a theme, and then I have a burst of 3 or 4 more alternatives. But to come up with twenty requires excavation. In the end, I hit upon Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City, a clean and simple title. The title was a play on a song that several people had quoted to me during my fieldwork. And because that title located itself in a particular place—Ho Chi Minh City—I simply discarded the subtitle. Of course, in some ways, the title was created at the tail-end, so the book did not take up the theme of dreaming as much as it could have had that title guided my writing throughout the process.
Does that title pass the Kidbiz test? Perhaps not. I did not fully address how money stirred people’s imagination, which would have to wait for Ivan Small’s fine ethnography on remittances, Currencies of the Imagination.
I had a similar struggle with the volume I co-edited with Stefan Senders, now a baker in upstate New York, nourishing his audiences in different ways. We eventually landed on Money: Ethnographic Encounters. The production team, however, was more eager to capture the keywords. They suggested a more expansive, Anthropology of Money. But that title was almost too grand, and lost sight of the work that we envisioned not just for the book but the series—short, accessible essays that would give readers a sense of the often contingent, sometimes tactical ways in which anthropologists make sense of fleeting encounters during their fieldwork. Granted, our discussions about the title occurred in 2005 or 2006, which was a very different moment in thinking about marketing books and keywords. That title eventually became a model for the series, each invoking a different theme of violence, food, childhood, home, and sex and united by the subtitle, “ethnographic encounters.”
It should not be at the tail-end of writing books that titles gain such import. In the classroom, I encourage students to take responsibility for their ideas by giving their paper relevant titles beyond “Essay 1.” Their titles are wildly ambitious, far beyond the scope the essay itself. Only books work through such ambitions. David Graeber’s Debt: A Five Thousand Year History comes to mind as does Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. A certain audacity characterizes their projects, and deservedly so.
So, these digressions bring me back to the place where I began. What if you, dear reader, applied the Kidbiz test to your next piece of writing? Would your readers be able to guess what follows, even if they never read beyond the title? I don’t think that should be the goal, but I do support Hayot’s provocative suggestion of “portable concepts.” His is a suggestion worth keeping.
