In college I studied English literature, which meant that I had to write dozens and dozens of non-fiction critical essays exploring different topics related to the works we were studying. Most of the program was built around cramming as many “accepted” writing techniques as possible into all the students, with the hope that this brute force approach would improve your writing if you survived to see the end of the term.
I wasn’t always very good at following every single one of the instructions, especially when it came to how to write the perfect title for a piece. I had two main professors in the program, and let’s say I had a…playful back and forth with them about the most enjoyable ways to craft an essay. One of them loved long, complicated titles with some kind of punctuation in the middle. The more colons you could insert, the better! She was easy to impress right off the bat. Put in some fancy statements separated by some kind of mark and you were off to the races.
The other professor was more, I don’t know, ethereal? She had a published background in lyrical poetry and wanted writing to feel more alive. She believed (as many modern writers do) that you should save your title selection process till the end, because you couldn’t fully know what your piece was about until you had…
