Creating titles for posts is annoying but maybe not entirely without merit.

Creating titles for posts is annoying but maybe not entirely without merit.

I have been trying out creating titles for more of my posts lately.

Having long been of the belief that giving a post a title feels artificial and overly formal, as well as that writing tools that require a post to have a title are annoying, this experiment feels strange to me. I think there are a few dynamics here.

I feel like my site is fine—and possible better—when I am simply writing what is on my mind regardless of whether it is microblog-style short posts or longer-form posts, so that my feed is a mix of both. That feels more natural and informal to me, and it’s what I generally want to go for on my site.

When all of my posts need to have a title—either because that’s what I am going for or because the CMS/whatever that I am using required titles either outright or due to the design renders untitled stuff—that balance feels off to me. I shouldn’t have to have a title for a post that is only a sentence or two long, and I ought to be able to have those kind of posts on my site if that’s what I feel like doing.

Also, it always feels weird to me to write a whole post and then have to go back and come up with a title. I never liked creating a title when I used to write fiction and I don’t like it any better now. Again, it feels artificial, and I worry that I am being overly proscriptive with the words I choose for the title.

Nonetheless, it is always good to test one’s assumptions, and if nothing else, maybe it pushes me to think a bit more about the structure of what I’m writing, not to mention to go a bit longer than just a bunch of micro-posts.