The talk title: what it has to do in twelve seconds

A title is read before anything else and faster than anything else. On a committee’s first pass it gets about twelve seconds, and in a printed programme it competes with five other titles in the same time slot. It has one job in both places, and it is the same job: say what the talk is about clearly enough that the right person keeps reading and the wrong person stops.

What a title is for

A title serves two readers at two different moments, and it is easy to write one that serves neither. The committee reads it cold, with no context beyond the track it was submitted to, and uses it to form a first impression that the abstract then either confirms or corrects. An attendee reads it months later, standing in a corridor with four minutes to choose between two rooms. Neither of them is trying to be entertained at that moment. Both are trying to answer one question, which is whether this talk is about the thing they care about.

The practical consequence: a title that requires the abstract to make sense has failed at the corridor, where there is no abstract. That is the test worth applying, because the corridor is the harder of the two situations and a title that survives it survives the committee easily.

The four kinds of title

Almost every submitted title falls into one of four shapes. They are not equally good, and the ranking is stable across events.

Descriptive. Names the subject and often the outcome: what was done, to what, with what result. Dull to write and reliably the strongest, because it is the only shape that works with no context at all.

Descriptive with a hook. A plain subject with one specific number or noun doing the work. This is where most good titles live: the specificity is the hook, so nothing has to be invented to make it interesting.

Metaphorical. Names a feeling about the subject rather than the subject. Sometimes excellent when the metaphor is the talk’s actual argument, and weak whenever it is decoration applied afterwards.

Punning. Trades all of the subject for a joke. It occasionally wins a lightning slot, where the stakes are five minutes, and it loses standard slots regularly, because a committee choosing between two proposals on similar subjects takes the one it can describe to somebody else.

Where clever goes wrong

The problem with a clever title is not that committees dislike cleverness. It is that a clever title moves the work of explaining the subject into the abstract, and the abstract already has more work than it can carry. Something has to be given up to make room, and what usually goes is the sentence saying what the audience will be able to do afterwards, which is the sentence that decides the outcome.

If the subject only appears in the abstract, the corridor never sees it.

There is a second, quieter cost. A title that depends on a shared reference excludes everyone who does not have it, and a regional audience is more mixed than the room in which the title was written. A joke that lands with half a room is a joke that half the room has to decode instead of listening.

Length, and what gets cut

Between four and nine words is the workable range. The constraint is not taste, it is typography: a programme card, a schedule grid and a mobile listing all truncate, usually somewhere between forty and sixty characters, and none of them warn the person who wrote the title. Anything essential sitting past that point is invisible in exactly the place where the choice gets made.

What this means for word order: the subject goes first and the qualification goes last. A title beginning with a long clause about context and arriving at the subject in word eleven is a title that reads, in a schedule grid, as a long clause about context.

Subtitles after a colon are a reasonable compromise, provided the part before the colon can stand alone. The half after a colon should be treated as optional, because in several of the places the title will appear, it is.

Testing a title

Three checks, applied in order, catch most of it. Read the title alone and say aloud what the talk is about; if that takes more than one sentence, the title is not carrying the subject. Show it to somebody who does not know the work and ask what they would expect to learn; a wrong answer is more useful than a blank one, because it shows what the title actually promises. Then look at the first forty characters on their own, which is what a phone will show.

A title is also the cheapest part of a proposal to change. It can be rewritten in the last hour before a deadline without touching anything else, and where a proposal is declined and sent elsewhere it is frequently the only thing worth changing at all.

The title carries the first twelve seconds; the abstract carries the thirty after it, and together they decide almost everything on a first pass. Both are submitted through the call for speakers, read as described on the review process page, and can be drafted a field at a time in the proposal builder.

Questions