LESSON PLAN: Is This Headline Clear? Learning About Ambiguity and Clarity From Headlines

Another great lesson plan from the New York Times Learning Network!

February 4, 2010, 2:53 PM

Is This Headline Clear? Learning About Ambiguity and Clarity From Headlines

By AMANDA CHRISTY BROWN AND HOLLY EPSTEIN OJALVO

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Overview | What are the purposes of headlines? What factors sometimes render them ambiguous, confusing or misleading? What role does grammar play in clarity? In this lesson, students review and revise ambiguous headlines to make them clearer, consider what makes headlines effective and generate their own tips and guidelines. Various related activities are provided for journalism, English language arts and English language learning.

Materials | Computers with Internet access (optional), handouts

Warm-up | Distribute Headline Headaches! (PDF), which offers a list of ambiguously written (and humorous) headlines, and tell them to work in pairs to parse each one according to the directions. Then discuss each headline, the errors and resulting humor, as well as their suggested fixes. Ask: Why do you think these sorts of miscommunications happen often in headlines? Jot down ideas on the board, and then explain that they will now read more about the reasons why ambiguities frequently crop up in headlines.

Related | In “Crash Blossoms,” Ben Zimmer discusses the humor that can result from ambiguous headlines and the coinage of the phrase “crash blossoms” to describe them:

In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlines in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.

Read the column with your class, using the questions below.

Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:

What about headline writing conventions (and other “compressed” forms, like telegrams, texts and tweets) makes it likely that headlines include phrases that can be read different ways?
What is a neologism?
What is the “garden-path phenomenon”? Have you experienced it while reading?
How and why is the English language “especially prone to such ambiguities”?
What words in this column are unfamiliar to you? How can you use context clues to help you figure out their meanings?

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Activity | Delve further into headlines and their purpose and function. Ask: What are the purposes of headlines? What can we learn from them? How do they convey information? Why is clarity important?

Prompt students to consider such elements as verb tense (use of present tense to convey a recent event and past tense to convey something that happened longer ago), word omission, capitalization, punctuation, active voice and so on. They should also discuss the differences in tone and style between news and opinion headlines and between print and online headlines.

To punctuate this discussion with real-world examples, consult the Poynter Online blog post “1,000 Headlines in 460 Days” and the headline resources provided, including an archive of Poynter’s Headline of the Day feature. In addition, many school newspapers are found here. And for fun, you might throw in some examples from The Onion.

Following this discussion, choose among the following activities, depending on your discipline, curriculum and students’ learning needs:

To read the full lesson here!