Escaping the colon: A paper title pitfall

Before you hand in your JP, take the time to be a rebel. Fight the power. Defy convention. Whatever you're writing about, whatever your department, do not use a colon in your title. This stylistic fad has infected nearly every piece of academic writing, leaving pomposity and destruction in its wake. Look at the titles of your classmates' work, the sources and journal articles you have referenced in your writing. Chances are high that most of their titles follow this model:

"Multilateral Perspectives, Unilateral Perceptions: An International Relations Analysis of Dispute Resolution Theory."

Awful, isn't it? There seems to be no escaping the colon. A quick look through catalogs of old Princeton senior theses reveals countless appositive horrors like Visualizing the Invisible: A Sociological and Photographic Study of Homeless Life in an American City, or Mis-Conceptions: Birth Control and the Pill in Contemporary Japan. This structure, a catchy phrase placed opposite a straightforward description of the work, occurs in the sciences too, witness cases like The Role of Pheromones in Human Sexual Behavior: An Inquiry.

None of this is to suggest that these are bad theses. I picked them at random from the list in Mudd Library and their content is not relevant to my diatribe against the colon. Believe me when I say how much I hope that whoever wrote on Pheromones has already retired to enjoy millions in profits from an international perfume empire. Is it really too much to ask for something new? The kind of forced, tight-lipped cuteness common to academic titles is a real strain on the reader and part of what gives rise to the accusation that academic writing is pompous, stuffy and obscure. Do we, for example, need that extra ": An Inquiry" added on at the end? Isn't every thesis a work of inquiry? Other than "Look at me! I can make up impressive-sounding phrases," does "Visualizing the Invisible" really say or mean anything? The Colonization of the language is by no means confined to Princeton. A search of journal archives like J-STOR shows that the epidemic is a global one, afflicting full-time scholars far worse than students.

Why do we rush to clog our prose with these sorts of constructions? I admit that I'm as guilty as anyone else. Eager to squeeze a couple of brownie points out of my last JP, I changed Counterinsurgency Strategy and Colombia's Paramilitary Ceasefire to the more cumbersome — but infinitely more impressive — Colombia's Paramilitary Ceasefire: Counterinsurgency Challenges and Opportunities. To a certain extent, then, this column is a penance for my own stylistic sins. We add ": An Inquiry" or a misconceived "Misconceptions" because we think it makes us sound smarter, cleverer, or just generally more intellectual. In doing so we become the slaves of fashion, betraying our own insecurities and desire to imitate our professors, even in their flaws.

Stylistic fashions change over time. The colon appears occasionally in Princeton thesis titles since at least the 1920s, but only begins to approach its current rate of infection by the mid-1970s. In days long gone by, there were other ways to conform. No doubt President Witherspoon would have been horrified if his students handed him anything less than Some partickular notes concerning the peculiar Role of Scents in human sexual behavior; being a true and factual account of the author's researches amongst the inhabitants of the Patagonian coast. A century later, James McCosh would have insisted that the work be entitled "On Pheromones." Although it might be fun to go retro on your JP or thesis title, the fact remains that academic writing has always been bloated and self-conscious. The colon represents a larger problem.

To be sure, there are instances, and even titles, in which it's just fine to use a colon. There is even one in this column. Remember, however, that The Role of Pheromones in Human Sexual Behavior would have been a perfectly nice title. The colon was just a submission to fashion. Fashion itself is a form of mind control, and not any less so when it comes to writing style. Ask yourself if the impressive catch phrase really makes your paper any better. In nine cases out of ten it will simply make your JP or thesis sound like everyone else's. Please, have the courage to yank the colon out of your title. Small steps like this will add up and might one day roll back its tyranny over punctuation, leaving our titles tidier and more to the point.

Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky is a Wilson Schoool major from New York, NY.