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

Applying my headline writing advice to some weaker, older headlines on my site, I realised others might find it useful to see how it works.

So here is my first headline improvement clinic. I've taken an old, weak headline and beefed it up:

Are reader donations a publishing business model?

At seven words and 50 characters this headline is short enough. It fits inside Google’s 64 character limit. Yet it could be tighter.

Like all version of ‘to be’, the verb ‘are’ is weak. It’s strengthened because it forms a question, but the headline needs backbone. ‘Can’ isn’t much better than ‘are’, but it’s a step forward. Adding the verb ‘save’ kicks things up a gear.

Articles, like ‘a’ rarely add anything to headlines – they act like padding. It’s best to lose them.

‘Publishing business model’ is jargon and off-putting for most readers. It has to go.

The story isn’t about general publishing, it’s about a print magazine. I could use ‘print magazine’ as the headline's object, but I prefer brevity, so I’ve opted for ‘print’.

Put these parts together gives me:

Can reader donations save print?

We’re down to a snappy five words and 32 characters. It’s more active than before thanks to the verb ‘save’. It’s also more direct and less off-putting.

Can you think of a better way to rewrite this headline?

I found this at Freelance Unbound. It's a classic:

Wrestling midgets are killed by fake hookers.

From the Surrey & Hants News

Found this at Freelance Unbound -  The charm of local newspapers.