Classic But Boring Titles Rewritten for Stunning Online Results?

How has it come to this?

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon from Pexels

I read an excellent article recently by the lovely and talented Hogan Torah titled “No One Will Read Your Story If The Title Sucks.” It’s a great read, in which he advocates the use of the Sharethrough Headline Analyzer to improve your story titles. It will give your title a score from 0 to 100, with the highest number possible obviously being the goal; you want to aim for a 70 or higher. I use both that one and Headline Studio because they are free and I’m cheap.

This talk of titles got me to thinking about classic titles from books, music, and movies and wondering how they would fare in our brave new online world. Sure, Dickens was a badass, but could his titles hang with the starving tech blogger trying frantically to reach 100 followers before Ev casts him into the outer darkness, where there will be wailing, gnashing of teeth, and no MPP coin? Apparently not.

To demonstrate just how weak so many supposed “classics” are, I have run the following ten through Headline Studio and then rewritten them to better reflect what we all want in our titles/headlines today (at least according to the Almighty Algorithm). The scores for each are posted in parentheses. Also, just in case you’re curious, the title of this article has a question mark it does…