Can I burrow a title?

Upon thinking about myself writing I discovered that the part that takes the longest to write or come up with is the title; I usually start writing about something and only at the end, when all the ideas are put on paper (be it virtual or otherwise) I start thinking about a name; and this is where all the hard things start happening…

The title is in my opinion very important because it is the first element, the first piece of text that the reader comes in contact with; how many times did you just postpone a read or even gave up on it because of a faulty title that didn’t sound good? I know I did this a lot of times and, even though I’m not very proud of myself, I admit that I’ll most probably keep doing it in the future. A bad title just puts me off and flaws the article in a way so profound as to make me gather all my patience, strength and goodwill just to read the first paragraph; and boy does this happen regularly! I use Google Reader for most of my online reading list and the title is the first thing that stings my eye in most cases; this, alongside the relative small amount of free time at my disposal make me just go ahead and mark uninteresting titles as read without even bothering to throw a glimpse at the content the post actually has to offer (this only happens to blogs which I’m not very found of or are work related; the rest deserve my sacrifice so I struggle to read at least the first couple of words).

But wait, there’s more! Being such a strange person that I am I can’t stand titles that seem overworked; for example I wouldn’t read this post for anything in the world because the title just seems to give to much away and looks over thought (it isn’t, it’s just copied and adapted from an album title featured in a Simpsons episode but you didn’t know that when you started reading this). I know perfection is hard to achieve and when it comes to titles it’s even harder but I think people should work a little more on titles, maybe even harder than on the rest of the post.

So, the first question that comes to mind is how do you  usually start: with an article or with its title?

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The second question is somewhat harder to answer so I’ll appreciate if we would talk about it in the comments.

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P.S. In the case of this article the title came first and just evolved into what you’ve just read.