I’m not to blame for this headline. It comes from the quoted Human Resources Leader story.

Knowledge workers doing the work of three people

The good news is it’s easy to fix. We can get rid of the wasteful words.

Articles like ‘the’ are best avoided in headlines. “Work of three people” is  passive, “three people’s work” is better.

I recast this as:

Knowledge workers do three people’s work

Another headline that could do with a small trim is:

Educated workers doing better in this recession

Headlines work best without pronouns, so we’ll do away with ‘this’.

The phrase ‘doing better’ is weak, but accurate. Replacing it with a word like ‘thrive’ would be incorrect. The educated workers are doing better than others, but they’re not advancing.

I could express the idea with a negative phrase such as “suffer less” – but that’s not good for headlines.  So I’ve chosen a different word and changed the meaning:

Educated workers safer in recession

The line above may not be the best headline you’ve ever read, but it’s not bad.

On the plus side it ticks the following boxes:

• Short, at just four words. Better still it uses short words, the whole headline is a mere 25 characters including spaces.
• Concise. Every word plays a role. There’s no filler.
• Unambiguous. Nobody is going to read the headline and wonder what it means.
• Simple. Readers don’t need to get their dictionaries out.
• Plain English. Some readers might argue the word ‘crap’ makes the English too plain. They have a point, but the word adds impact. The more genteel;“Make headlines great” isn’t as interesting and doesn’t say much at all.
• Keyword loaded. Readers searching Google for tips on great headlines should find it.
• It promises readers there is something worthwhile in the story.
• Active rather than passive.

If you can tick all these boxes, you'll write great headlines.

The headline is better than my first attempt:

“Turning crap online headlines into great ones”

“Turning … into” adds an extra word, but the preposition “into” doesn’t add much more information.

Likewise, the ‘ones’ at the end is an adjective – which doesn’t pack as much punch as a verb or noun.

I could have written:

“Repair crap online headlines”

Which would be shorter, but repairing things isn’t as good as making them great.

And I removed online, because anyone reading the story online is likely to assume we’re talking about headlines on web pages rather than newspapers.

One weakness in my headline is the keywords are at the end, not the start. This may hurt it’s position in Google search and it may be missed by readers glancing through a list of titles, only seeing the first word or two. But overall, it works.

This is the third in a headline writing series.

Your school may have taught you not to use a preposition to end a sentence. This is a hangover from Latin and Greek – sentences in those languages never ended with prepositions.

Years ago I worked in the public relations department of Britain’s Science and Engineering Research Council. My boss took me to task for ending a sentence with a preposition.

He told me it was; “Something, up with which, I will not put” – a quote from Winston Churchill.*

The grammar police won’t agree, but this is a rule you can comfortably ignore for everyday writing, business writing, journalism and all types of online communications.

In practical everyday writing there will be many cases when it doesn’t make sense to contort your sentences to avoid ending with a proposition. Your writing will be clearer and easier to understand.

And you’ll be in great company. Most newspaper style guides allow it, most popular authors and the overwhelming majority of modern literary authors sidestep the rule.

*Churchill was on my side in this. I suspect my boss didn’t realise the quote was a joke.

Newspapers teach journalists to write using the inverted pyramid.

It isn’t always right, but the inverted pyramid has worked well for news writing since the days reporters telegraphed dispatches to editors. Today it works well for online writing.

The structure echoes the classic essay structure you were taught — or should have been taught — at school.

The basic format is:

• Introduction — say what the piece is about; Answer questions like who, what, where and when. You can also explain why at this point, although that can wait until later.
• Then — expand, amplify;
• Keep doing this until you’ve told the whole story. Make the most important points first then add more and more detail in each additional paragraph.

Traditional newspaper editors cut a story from the bottom if it needs to fill a specific space on a printed page.

The inverted pyramid structure, with each paragraph being progressively less important, means editors remove the least crucial information first.

A news story written using the inverted pyramid structure can be cut at the end of any paragraph, even the first paragraph, and still be a self-contained story.

Online this means search engines pay more attention to the most important words – which helps people find your writing. Those opening paragraphs also make neat summaries for listings and similar online uses.

So, the most important information goes in the first paragraph and each extra paragraph of subsidiary information carries progressively less weight. That’s where the inverted pyramid name comes from: the foundation sits at the top, the less important details are at the bottom.

I'm a career journalist and editor.

What have I learnt about running a web site?

1. You don't need fancy software to blog.
2. Free hosting services are as good as or better than self-hosting.
3. Blogging can take up a huge amount of time, but it doesn't have to.
4. There's a community aspect to blogging that isn't apparent until you dive in and do it yourself.
5. Blogging is similar, but not the same as journalism.
6. My blogs don't tend to drive traffic to my website, nor do they deliver any direct economic benefits.