Bloggers have been asking the question “Do long or short headlines work better?” for a long time.
But the answer to the riddle of how to create a headline that pulls in readers doesn’t necessarily lie in subtracting or adding one more word. There’s not a mysterious formula or arcane copywriter’s trick.
The answer is much simpler than that.
The best way to get a headline that works is by using the breath test.
Try saying this headline aloud:
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Ran out of breath, didn’t you? And even if you didn’t quite run out of breath, you had a hard time getting through the whole thing.
You’ll also find that you struggle to recall the contents of that headline. Because if you can’t say it in one breath, you can’t hear it in one breath, either.
When your headline can’t be easily said aloud in a single breath, your message gets garbled.
Look at some of the most enduring headlines ever:
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They Laughed when I Sat Down at the Piano. But when I Started
to Play …
That last one was a mouthful, wasn’t it?
No matter how you try, it’s hard to say: “They laughed when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play … ” in one breath.
So what’s going on here? How come this headline works when it clearly fails the breath test?
It’s called punctuation.
If you have a long headline, all you have to do is punctuate to indicate that there’s a pause there. You’re ending one thought and beginning another.
How you punctuate it is totally up to you. You could use parentheses. Or an em dash. Or a comma.
The original headline used a period, making it two separate sentences. But that headline could also be punctuated like this:
They Laughed when I Sat Down at the Piano (But when I Started
They Laughed when I Sat Down at the Piano — But when I Started
to Play …
They Laughed when I Sat Down at the Piano, but when I Started
to Play …
Punctuation exists to give a mental pause between thoughts. When you have that pause built into your headline, a reader can read it as if it were two sentences. So even though it looks like one big sentence, it’s really two.
Next time you’ve written a great headline and you’re wondering if it’s too long, just do the breath test. If it fails, add some punctuation.
If it still fails, dump the headline and start again. You should never compromise when writing headlines.
If your reader can’t process your headline in a single breath, they can’t process it in their heads, either — which will render a perfectly good headline perfectly useless.