Headline writing is for the birds?

Ambiguity comes easily when one writes headlines, sometimes. Here’s an example: “An inexpensive, 3D‐printable breast muscle meter for field ornithologists,” Luke L. Powell, Adam Metallo, Crinan Jarrett, Nathan W. Cooper, Peter P. Marra, Scott R. McWilliams, Ulf Bauchinger, and Bryant C. Dossman, Journal of Field Ornithology, vol. 92, no. 1, March 1, 2021, pp. 67-76. […]

Headline Power: Wine + Cheese + Cognitive

A new press release demonstrates how to draw attention (as yours is drawn right now) to a press release by including the words “wine”, “cheese”, and “cognitive” in the headline: Diet modifications — including more wine and cheese — may help reduce cognitive decline, study suggests Date: December 10, 2020 Source: Iowa State University Summary: […]

How to write a hard-to-resist science headline: Quantum, Coffee

Trinity College Dublin produced a press release, on January 31, 2020, with this headline: “Supercomputers help link quantum entanglement to cold coffee“. The press release is meant to draw attention to a research paper by Marlon Brenes, Silvia Pappalardi [pictured here], John Goold, and Alessandro Silva. The paper is titled “Multipartite Entanglement Structure in the Eigenstate […]

How to Begin a Scientific Report: Headless, Topless

Here’s one way to begin a scientific report. Grab the reader’s attention: “Real faces, real emotions: perceiving facial expressions in naturalistic contexts of voices, bodies and scenes,” Beatrice de Gelder [pictured here] and Jan Van den Stock, in A.J. Calder, G. Rhodes, J.V. Haxby & M.H. Johnson (Eds.), The handbook of face perception. Oxford: Oxford […]