Stop it with the ing-ing headlines (Examples!)

Present participle heads may be worse than labels

Barney Kilgore, the legendary editor of The Wall Street Journal, once wrote: “If I see ‘upcoming’ slip in[to] the paper again, I’ll be downcoming and someone will be outgoing.”

I’m with Barney: Stop ing-ing. Especially in headlines.

Now, to be fair, Kilgore’s comment refers to gerunds: verbs that get turned into nouns with the addition of an “-ing,” as in “Writing is fun.”

What I’m talking about are present participles, aka progressive verbs, as in “I am writing.”

Avoid present participling-noun headlines.

So who ever decided that “Present Participling Noun” was a clever headline? You’ve seen (maybe even written!) ing-ing headlines like these:

Hiring to Win

Taking Farming Further

Scaling the China Opportunity

Introducing A New App for Android

Committing to Our Ag & Turf Ambition

Introducing the Strategic Growth Incentive

Creating Meaningful Relationships at Work

Making dams safer for fish around the world

Announcing Our 2014 Scholarship Program Recipients

Transforming and Deepening Our Strategic Partnerships

Understanding Biofilm Roles in Reactions and Processes

Enabling better outcomes and lower costs through integration

Ending Child Trafficking through Collaboration, Awareness, and Support

So what’s wrong with “Introducing the Strategic Growth Incentive”?

Why avoid present participle headlines?

Ing-ing headlines like these:

• Focus on your actions instead of the reader’s needs. Instead of “Introducing A New App for Android,” how about “Get your job done in 12 minutes a week with new Android app”?
• Suck the subject out of the headline. We’re supposed to be writing about people doing things. Where are the actors in these headlines?
• Ing the action. The verb is the story. Ing-ing verbs are weaker.
• Just point to the noun. Instead of “Announcing Our 2014 Scholarship Program Recipients,” how about “2014 scholarship recipients headed to Harvard”?
• Take the benefits out of the headline. Which would you rather read: “Transforming and Deepening Our Strategic Partnerships”? Or “6 ways to jumpstart strategic partnerships”?
• Rarely get used by serious journalists. The New York Times, for instance, mostly avoids them.

Write like the Times.

We analyzed 99 headlines in the Dec. 15, 2014, edition of the Times. (We skipped the sports pages.) Of those, just four — about 4% — were ing-ing heads:

Stoking a Creative Spark

Stuart Shugg and Anna Azrieli in the DoublePlus Series

Stepping Back Into a Role’s Shoes

James Morris’s Unexpected Return to ‘Meistersinger’

Shaping a Shepherd of Catholics,
From Argentine Slums to the Vatican

‘The Great Reformer’: Austen Ivereigh on Pope Francis

Turning #IllRideWithYou Into Real-World Action in Australia

When you find these headlines in your own copy, rewrite. Make it subject, verb, object. Then you’ll wind up with verbs like:

• Stoke
• Step
• Shape
• Turn

Take a tip from the Times: Limit ing-ing drastically. Even better, stop ing-ing at all.