Across all genres, nominal titles are possibly the most common title construction. Being the simplest form of title – essentially, a kind of name label – they are efficient and effective. The following is a typical nominal title.


This type of title is a sentence fragment, not a full sentence; it is based on noun phrases and contains no finite verbs. It is ‘indicative’ in that it merely indicates what the paper discusses but gives no information about the findings.


The titles above are effective because they are specific but also reasonably short. You need to be able to strike a balance between including as much detail as possible while still keeping your title short.