In all the ambits, the title summarizes the main ideas of your study. A good title contains the fewest possible words that adequately describe the contents and purpose of your research. The title is the part of a paper that is read the most, and usually the part that is read first.

• General considerations
  
  In miniature, the title of your humanities paper should reflect four aspects of your academic writing skills that will continue to be important in the rest of the paper: your summary skills, your ability to write for a specific community, your authorial voice and your intention to make an original contribution to the field.
  
  The title shows your summary skills by describing the subject of the paper clearly and concisely. When your paper is an analysis, you may be able to do this in just a few words.
  
  

  Cycles of Neglect in Hideo Tanaka’s Dark Water

  
  But when it reports on a procedure or describes a specific project, the title may need to be longer.
  
  

  Subtitling Flamenco for Netflix: Creating the Subtitles and Pivot Language Dialogue List for the Documentary Flamencas: mujeres, fuerza y duende

  
  Whatever its length, aim for a title that avoids unnecessary words. For example, the following titles describe the main ideas in the paper but are rather long.
  
  

  Robert Rauschenberg’s use of the painting Bed to examine the concept and practice of portraiture The relationship between moments of sadness and pleasure in the novels of J. P. Donleavy

  
  You can shorten the phrases by removing any unnecessary words to get better titles.
  
  

  Rauschenberg’s Bed as an Examination of Portraiture Sadness and Pleasure in J. P. Donleavy

  
  After summary skills, your title should reflect your ability to address your particular academic community, also called your discourse community. This means showing you are familiar with the concepts customarily discussed by members of the community and successfully including the academic terms they use. To indicate this knowledge and ability, the second title above might be slightly revised.
  
  

  Sadness and the Notion of Jouissance in J. P. Donleavy

  
  Second, show you know what is expected of you by the community in more general terms. For example, because research indicates that papers with shorter titles can get more citations and are easier to understand (Letchford et al, 2015), short titles are valued by academics in general. You may only be planning to publish this paper as a final project in your university repository, but the reader will value your short title as attention to good academic practices.
  
  After summary skills and familiarity with your discourse community, the title should reflect your authorial voice: the style and features of your writing that distinguish it from other people’s. This may sound daunting if you are just beginning your academic career, but in practice you can start simply by adding a detail that is originally yours but also fits with what your discourse community would expect. For example, you could give authorial voice to the title above by rewording it to remind the reader of something that was typical of Donleavy, namely his habit of giving novels alliterative titles (The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman, etc.).
  
  

  The Joyless Jouissance of J. P. Donleavy

  
  Speaking directly to your discourse community and working on your authorial voice are also closely connected to the fourth and last aspect that your title should reflect: your intention to make an original contribution to research. In fact, the three often go together.
  
  

  From Charlie to Evan and Bach Again: Improvisation as a Constant in Musical Practice

  
  The title above comes from a paper defending the musical genre known as free jazz. In it, the writer proposes that free jazz musicians today use the same techniques that classical musicians used in other periods of history and that, for this reason, their music deserves similar critical attention. The paper therefore clearly addresses a discourse community (scholars of musicology) and sets itself a task (to convince the sceptics). But to argue the case, the writer will quickly need to assert their knowledge of the subject and find an authorial voice, and this is where the title is important. In the example above, the writer asserts their knowledge by choosing as examples of free players two well-known musicians who happen to have the same family name (Charlie Parker, who will be known by specialists and non-specialists alike, and Evan Parker, who only specialists or enthusiasts will recognize) so that they can omit the name and make the reader call it up from their own specialist knowledge – or to be more precise, make the reader appreciate that they, the writer, know enough to engineer the coincidence in the first place. And second, as in the J. P. Donleavy title earlier in this page, they create a sense of voice by engaging in wordplay (where “Bach” refers to both Johann Sebastian Bach and the word “back” in the common phrase “and back again”).