Do you know the name of the first bank in the United States? The First Bank of The United States of course.  How about the second bank?  The Second Bank of the United States. (…)

Titles of papers have something in common with names of banks. A paper titled Law and Finance is guaranteed to be the seminal paper in the field because if it were not then that title would have already been taken. You can go ahead and cite it without actually reading it. By contrast, you can safely ignore a paper with a title like Valuation and Dynamic Replication of Contingent Claims in a General Market Enviornmnet Based on the Beliefs-Preferences Guage Symmetry. The title is essentially telling you “Don’t read me. Instead go and read a paper whose title is simply Valuation of Contingent Claims.” (…)

Two pieces of advice follow from these observations. First, find the simplest title not yet taken for your papers. One word titles are the best. Second, before you get started on a paper, think about the title.  If you can’t come up with a short title for it then its probably not worth writing.

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photo { Paul Graham }

guide, ideas | January 26th, 2011