Boring presentation titles?

I was looking for another person and detoured myself to a WWW page of a Prof Graham Sewell at Melbourne University. Out of curiosity I browsed the titles of past publications and it hit me: the presentation titles of my past presentations are simply plain boring!

I am not a specialist of management as the good professor Sewell, but even I can appreciate the lure of titles like

• “Yabba-Dabba-Do: Evolutionary Psychology and the Rise of Flintstone Psychological Thinking in Organization & Management Studies.”
• “Looking for the Good Soldier Švejk: Alternative Modalities of Resistance in the Contemporary Workplace.”

Of course each profession, each journal and each conference has their own implicit code of desired and not desired article titles. And also: being whimsical or funny in the title does not guarantee good communication value or even marketing value of an article.

My shallow experience in research world showed few daring individuals in computer science and engineering management fields with a skill for tasteful stretching of the local title naming canon. I assume local journal or conference editors can have an effect on this. But reality is this: good article / presentation names can mean a difference of consuming or ignoring some content. Experts, consultants like professors have to "get" the basics of personal marketing or even personal branding. I remember seeing complaints about some AI researchers who intentionally (or who's followers) built a certain "rock star" quality tagged into their persona, especially closer to the end of AI honeymoon of 1980's.

I have to give this a thought and learn a lesson on this. Maybe if I study some of my past article or presentation titles and try to rethink them I could

• improve the lure of them
• highlight the message with analogy to a phenomena from outside my domain
• myself learn new aspects about my own subject matter by finding the analogies or catchy referencies to popular culture
  

As an example we could work out the title

"10 important things in test planning"

10 things of test planning that can go wrong
Risk slant that has somewhat schoolteacher or old educational film feeling on it. Maybe with some old clip art?

10 things of test planning you should worry about
Getting personal on the style of self-help book titles, but not worrying. There is a promise of an improvement.

10 ways to avoid your test plan to fail on you

I am not sure how this would be understood by native English speakers. But a personal risk can highlight the message.

Or how about

"The 5 tasks of a test manager"

(a reference to a book by Mr Royer, further details in a previous post.)

Five ways to fail as a test manager

Hmm, this can be experienced as too threatening, but communicates the risk.

Be a five star test manager!
Motivational, but resembles the "hard sell" approach that I personally hate so much. And I would never trust a consultant that promises to do that for me. But maybe as an article title this would work.

A multitalented test manager

This one has the focus on test manager not being just a planner or being on control.

Format of a title

From examples of Prof Sewell we identify the common title format of "Phrase: explanation" close to the so very common book title format "Boring or Whimsical title -- Subtitle that tells what this is about". So making better use of the title space in journals of conference programs, I should adjust my titles to include not just a new angle but also the catchy phrase too.

What I learned from this exercise is this

• Language is a wonderful tool if you can use it; being a non-native speaker of bad English it is better to probe reactions from few native speakers first before trying something too creative/complicated/whimsical or producing wrong association in a mind of a reader
• Paying attention to the title really is a good idea and I should put more effort on that
• Thinking about presentation titles is an effective way to consume an hour of my time, that maybe would have spent better on learning more about my subject matter :-)

Peace all,
Erkki alias theGromit