Jay Doubleyou: ambiguous newspaper headlines
... here is an excellent lesson the subject:
Is This Headline Clear? Learning About Ambiguity and Clarity From Headlines
Overview | What is the purpose of headlines? What factors sometimes render them ambiguous, confusing or misleading? What role does grammar play in clarity? In this lesson, students review and revise ambiguous headlines to make them clearer, consider what makes headlines effective and generate tips and guidelines. Various related activities are provided for journalism, English language arts and English language learning.
Materials | Computers with Internet access (optional), handouts.
Warm-Up | Distribute Headline Headaches! (PDF), which offers a list of ambiguously written (and humorous) headlines, and tell students to work in pairs to parse each one according to the directions. Then, discuss each headline, the errors and resulting humor, as well as their suggested fixes. Ask: Why do you think these sorts of miscommunications happen often in headlines? Jot down ideas on the board, and then explain that they will now read more about the reasons why ambiguities frequently crop up in headlines.
Related | In “Crash Blossoms,” Ben Zimmer discusses the humor that can result from ambiguous headlines and the coinage of the phrase “crash blossoms” to describe them:
In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.
Read the column with your class, using the questions below.
Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:
- What about headline-writing conventions (and other “compressed” forms, like telegrams, texts and tweets) makes it likely that headlines include phrases that can be read different ways?
- What is a neologism?
- What is the “garden-path phenomenon”? Have you experienced it while reading?
- How and why is the English language “especially prone to such ambiguities”?
- What words in this column are unfamiliar to you? How can you use context clues to help you figure out their meanings?
Activity | Delve further into headlines and their purpose and function. Ask: What are the purposes of headlines? What can we learn from them? How do they convey information? Why is clarity important?
Prompt students to consider elementslike verb tense (use of present tense to convey a recent event and past tense to convey something that happened longer ago), word omission, capitalization, punctuation, active voice and so on. They should also discuss the differences in tone and style between news and opinion headlines and between print and online headlines.
To punctuate this discussion with real-world examples, consult the Poynter Online blog post “1,000 Headlines in 460 Days” and the headline resources provided, including an archive of Poynter’sHeadline of the Day feature. In addition, many school newspapers are found here. And for fun, you might throw in some examples from The Onion.
Following this discussion, choose among the following activities, depending on your discipline, curriculum and students’ learning needs:
Journalism: Read, print out or project the Caucus blog post on various headlines about the Henry Louis Gates arrest and resulting controversy. Invite students to compare the headlines Peter Baker compiled. Ask: What effect is each of these publications striving for in their selected headlines? What does their use of humor suggest about the story? Is humor appropriate, given the situation? What might you write?
For another, more thorough comparison of headlines from a single story, check out “So Many Headlines, So Few Zingers.”
Tell students they will be comparing headlines in different publications of the same basic news story, using the Newseum’s Front Pages. Before class, choose a major news story, represented in a good number of newspapers. Ask students find and list five different headlines for the story. In small groups, ask students to discuss if each headline is effective and why or why not. Then, reconvene as a class to debrief.
Alternatively, have students look at today’s New York Times front page or at the home page of NYTimes.com – or both – and discuss which headlines “work,” which don’t, and why.
If you haven’t already, look together at tips and guidelines about effective headline writing from Poynter Online, the American Copy Editors Society or No Train No Gain.
Finally, drawing on class discussion and the resources above, engage students in creating a list of characteristics of effective headlines to close class.
English Language Arts: Remind students of grammar’s role in creating clear headlines and sentences. Return to their answers on the handout Headline Headaches! and work together to generate a list of reasons, including specific grammatical reasons, ambiguities often appear in headlines.
The list might include, for example, structure and word sequence (“Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years”), multiple meanings and connotation (“Puerto Rican teen named mistress of the universe”), grammar errors (“State: Don’t need to write that good”) and more.
Provide students with headlines, using the resources listed above, for finding examples of the errors they come up with, and to find errors to generate more items for their list. They might also generate some tips on how to avoid such errors.
Post the list in the classroom and have students find more examples of such errors from newspapers and magazines, as well as from classroom texts and even perhaps their writing drafts, to add to the board.
English Language Learning/English as a Second Language: Use the front page of The New York Times eitheronline, or in print, to have students try any of the following:
- Cut out five headlines and the first paragraph of each article and mix them separately in an envelope. Students try to match the headline to the correct first paragraph and explain their choices.
- Students work in pairs to choose a headline from The Times and, without reading the article, explain what they think it means. Which headlines on the front page were clearest? Why? Which were confusing, or might be confusing to someone just learning English (In general, Times news headlines are more straightforward than the often-playful headlines on feature articles, and the front page features a mixture of both.) Have them choose one headline that was difficult for them and rewrite it using simpler or more direct wording.
- Students cut out and recombine words from individual Times headlines to create a new, grammatically correct headline for an imaginary news story. For example, from the front page of Feb. 4, 2010, students could use “Toyota Says Prius Brakes Had Design Problems, “Rebuilding Effort in Haiti Turns Away From Tents,”“For Scots, a Scourge Unleashed by a Bottle” and “Pakistani Scientist Found Guilty of Shootings,” to create “Scientist Says Scourge Found in Tents.”
Going Further | Here are ways to take this activity further, depending on your curriculum:
Journalism: Students use their new knowledge of what makes effective headlines to write or revise headlines for their own publication.
E.L.A.: Students work in pairs or groups to create grammatically unambiguous headlines. These headlines might be about a book the class is reading (for example, they write one headline for each scene in a Shakespeare play), or about a community or school event. For a greater challenge, students might write two versions of each original headline, one that is clear and elegant, and another that is in some way ambiguous or misleading.
To continue this discussion and the effects that technology is having on grammar and written expression, share the Times article“Language as a Blunt Tool of the Digital Age.”
Alternatively, students read the neologisms on the Schott’s Vocab blog, like “Goldilocks devices,” “publicy” and “wocial.” (They can also read the archives of a long-running neologism contest run by the Washington Post columnist Bob Levey.) Using these blog entries as models, they create their own neologisms.
E.L.L./E.S.O.L.: Students bring in any print or online headlines that confuse them and work as a class to parse the headlines and rewrite them for greater clarity and simplicity.
Standards | From McREL, for grades 6 to 12:
Language Arts
1. Uses the general skills and strategies of the writing process.
5. Uses the general skills and strategies of the reading process.
7. Uses the general skills and strategies to understand a variety of informational texts.
8. Uses listening and speaking strategies for different purposes.
10. Understands the characteristics and components of the media.
1. Uses the general skills and strategies of the writing process.
5. Uses the general skills and strategies of the reading process.
7. Uses the general skills and strategies to understand a variety of informational texts.
8. Uses listening and speaking strategies for different purposes.
10. Understands the characteristics and components of the media.
Life Skills: Working With Others
1. Contributes to the overall effort of a group.
4. Displays effective interpersonal communication skills.
1. Contributes to the overall effort of a group.
4. Displays effective interpersonal communication skills.
Life Skills: Thinking and Reasoning
3. Effectively uses mental processes that are based on identifying similarities and differences.
3. Effectively uses mental processes that are based on identifying similarities and differences.
Arts and Communication
1. Understands the principles, processes and products associated with arts and communication media.
2. Knows and applies appropriate criteria to arts and communication products.
3. Uses critical and creative thinking in various arts and communication settings.
4. Understands ways in which the human experience is transmitted and reflected in the arts and communication.
Is This Headline Clear? Learning About Ambiguity and Clarity From Headlines - NYTimes.com1. Understands the principles, processes and products associated with arts and communication media.
2. Knows and applies appropriate criteria to arts and communication products.
3. Uses critical and creative thinking in various arts and communication settings.
4. Understands ways in which the human experience is transmitted and reflected in the arts and communication.
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