- Think about what a title is.
A title is a reason to open a book,
or buy a ticket to a film, or get excited about a talk.
Ideally, a title should give you
a sense of what you're going to hear,
but also a sense of why you wanna hear it.
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- Thinking about the title of your talk,
you have to consider that this is
the first impression you're leaving on your audience.
People are going to see your title even before meeting you.
They're gonna get that in an email,
or they're going to see a flyer somewhere.
You want it to be enticing,
but you also want it to be effective
in telling your audience, or giving them an idea of,
what they will be listening to.
- One way to think about it is,
use that core message that you've developed,
and you want the title of your talk
to be reflective of that.
You definitely wanna stay away
from having a title that's six lines long.
If I see a talk title that is
very jargon-y and very complex,
it's already telling me that maybe
the talk is not gonna be very accessible
if I don't understand the title.
- Describe what's gonna happen in the talk accurately,
what's gonna be covered,
but then in a way that's accessible
even if I'm a scientist in a slightly different field,
so I understand why I would wanna go
to that talk in the first place.
I mean, some people are very clever
and have these really great, punny titles,
or humor in some way.
I am not that person,
I don't think I've ever done a humorous title.
- If you can pull off the humor in subtle ways,
I think that can be really effective.
I got to name a protein, and I named it Patronin
after the Patronus Charm in Harry Potter.
And so, as a part of my title I had "Expecto Patronin",
and then I had some more descriptive thing
about what my talk was gonna be about,
but I was trying to be
a little humorous in the title to grab people.
- This is your often one chance to be like,
"Hey, I'm here, I'm at your university or your institution,
come see me, here's my title."
- You want the title of your talk
to invite people to come in,
to pique their curiosity and say,
"Ooh, that sounds interesting, I wanna go listen."
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