For instance, imagine you’re reading a magazine article entitled “Three Hundred Sixty-five Properly Poofy Days.” Reading that title, do you have any idea what this article is going to be about?

• It could be written by a meteorologist, reporting on a year of observing cloud formations.
• It might be a biopic (a biographical story) about an eccentric salon that specializes in “big hair” dos.
• Perhaps it’s a set of guidelines for using poofy cotton balls to apply cosmetics.
• Or it could be a story about a dog groomer who grooms poodles, the poofiest of dogs.

This title doesn’t give enough information about the content of the text. Keep this in mind when you are writing your own titles!

In the case of the image on the right, the main title, To Be an American, could mean quite a few different things, but the phrases “cultural pluralism” and “rhetoric of assimilation” give us a hint that the book will be about how and whether minority communities maintain their own cultures or assimilate. If you read the description of the book, you’ll see that this one focuses specifically on immigrants, a point which isn’t clear from the title, though it is implied a bit in the idea of the main title about being American. This is an example of a title that could be a bit clearer to help readers understand the focus of the book.

Article titles also use subtitles, though this is much more common in scholarly articles than in popular articles. The first part of the title “Mobile Phone Use While Driving” (below) leads us to believe that the article will focus on something about using phones while we drive, but the subtitle tells us that the article will be about the surveys that gather information about mobile phone use.

Let’s go back to the sample assignment and preview Mitchell’s article:

• Title—The complete title is “The First Battle in the Culture Wars: The Quality of Diversity.”
  • The first part tells me that Mitchell is going to discuss the “culture wars,” and when I look this up, I see that these are conflicts between cultures about which one is going to be dominant. Given the picture that appears in the original publication of this article, I’m assuming he’s talking about racial conflict in the United States. I wonder why he’s talking about a “first” battle, though, since that war has been going on for a long time.
  • This subtitle tells me that Mitchell is going to talk about diversity, but he is using the phrase “quality of diversity.” When I try searching for that phrase, I don’t get much. I know generally what diversity is, so I look up “quality” just to try to find a definition that fits here. I find two that might fit: a standard for how something is measured or a distinctive characteristic.

• Author—The author is Nicholas Ensley Mitchell. Near the top of the article, there is a link and his title. He’s an assistant professor of curriculum studies at the University of Kansas. When I click on the link, I find out that he has a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, that he has worked as a policy and research fellow at Loyola University, and that he researches the ways in which race appears in school curricula. This article doesn’t appear to be about school curricula (at least not so far), but it is about race relations.
• Headings—There are two headings in this article: “Segregated Coexistence” and “Living in Community.” “Segregated coexistence” sounds like people living near each other without integrating. They get along mostly by ignoring each other. “Living in community” sounds like something a minister would say, meaning living together in ways that are connected. Without reading the article, I don’t really know if this is what Mitchell means, but these are central ideas in the text, since they each get their own heading.
• Pictures and Pullouts—There are two pictures with the original publication of this article.
  • The first shows mostly Black people walking with arms linked. The printing on some of their shirts indicate that they are protesting restrictions on voting rights, and the caption says that this is what they were doing in Washington, D.C. on July 15, 2021. This reinforces my sense that Mitchell is focusing on Black equity issues in the U.S.
  • The second shows protesters arguing across a police line. The caption tells me that one is a white supremacist and the other is a Black man, and the picture was taken in New York City on September 3, 2020. This picture echoes the use of “war” in the title of the article.
  • There are no pull-outs in this article.
• Publication Date—This article was published on October 14, 2021. This is pretty recent, and issues like voting rights and how voting restrictions hurt minorities were in the news at that time. Around the same time, particularly with the COVID pandemic, there was a lot of discussion about racial disparities and how so many Blacks are killed by police (and others). There was (and still is, as of this writing) a lot of tension around race in the U.S. at this time.

Going into this reading, I know that the article will deal with race relations in the United States. Because of the assignment, I know that I need to focus most on what Mitchell means by “the quality of diversity,” “segregated coexistence,” and “living in community.”

It took me much longer to write this preview up than it did to do the actual previewing. Pre-reading this article took less than five minutes. Writing this up took about thirty.