These activities were designed by Jacqui Frew for Writers Workshop students.

Feeling that many students’ titles just didn’t do justice to their work, I decided to focus on title-writing for a lesson or two to help them create stronger titles for their writing.

First I put on the whiteboard this list of texts published with alternative titles and asked if the students knew of any more (they did know of some alternative film titles, but I didn’t think to record them at the time):

The students considered which title they preferred if they knew the text, or which one they would rather read or view if they didn’t know it. After we’d shared their choices, we considered what their preferred titles did for the text. The discussion about Evil Angels vs A Cry in the Dark was particularly interesting, with the class pretty much evenly divided.

Next we did a quick raid on the library with each student taking a fiction shelf to scan, coming back with three interesting titles to share. We listed them on a poster to put up as inspiration for other writers, and discussed which ones we would most like to read.

Then I did the title-less poems activity from Introducing Poems, in which students were given three poems without their titles, and in groups, worked out titles for each. We put the suggestions on the whiteboard and discussed which we thought worked best and why, before comparing them with the original titles. This helped the students to realise that titles can perform many different functions in poetry.

(Earlier in the course, we had done the reverse of this and students had taken turns to chose titles from poetry anthologies for the class to use as a quick-writing activity. As we reflecting on the different kinds of writing the same title had produced, the students became more aware of the power of the dynamic between title and writing.)

Next, I invited students to choose a piece of their own writing that they would like to have another go at titling. We shared and discussed their revised titles.

It was surprising what an impact this simple set of activities had on the class. We realised that some titles work best in anticipation of the work and others in retrospect. We discovered a couple of students with particular talents as title-writers who became an excellent resource. The students started making much stronger, more considered, selections for their titles. Many found that as they concentrated on working out the right title for their writing, they were coming to grips with what really lay at its heart. Then they were able to revise with this focus in mind. The difference this sometimes made to their work was remarkable.