Titles

Titles have changed dramatically with the advent of computers. A good title's purpose is what it has always been: to get readers to read the paper. Thirty years ago, that meant catching the eye of human readers, so something witty and playful worked well. Now, scholars search for articles online, and so the title needs first to catch the eye of search engines. What catches the eye of a computer is keywords: include the name of the work you're writing on or the author in a title, and give some indication of what you're argument is going to be. "Excessive Chivalry in Malory" is better for computers than "Too Courteous by Half."

Humans, of course, don't respond nearly so well to lists of keywords, so people still try for something catchy. One solution a lot of academics have adopted is to use a colon, with a witty title first and then a subtitle with all the keywords, as in "Tainting Paradise: Imagining a Perfect Woman in a Misogynist Age in Milton's Paradise Lost." The problem now is that so many scholars have done this it has become a stereotype and a joke, and editors are increasingly suspicious of titles with colons. So, if possible, strip out the colon (in the preceding example, the subtitle works as a title), but if it's not possible, use the colon: you'll have lots of company.

Separate title pages are not necessary (at least for me). Title pages come from the process of publishing articles. Journals practice blind review -- they send out each paper to experts who do not know the author so the editors can check the scholarship without worrying about personal jealousies. For this to work, the title page is needed; it tells the editor all your personal information, but it can easily be taken off so that reviewers can read your paper without your name on it. If you want to get used to this, go ahead and use a title page; otherwise, just putting the title and your name on the first page is fine.

Unless you are told otherwise, all you need to put is your name and the title of the paper. If you're going to put it in the instructor's mailbox or under her office door, then put the instructor's name on the paper in case it ends up in the hands of the wrong person by mistake. Unless you are in a big lecture class that divides into a number of discussion sections led by separate TAs, you don't need to put the class and section numbers down.