EMail of the Week #1
EMail of the Week #1
From: Awesome Student
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 5:26 PM
To: Ms. B.
Subject: Titles
Hey what do you think of this title for my paper on Jean Sot
“Jaunty Jean”. Is that a title catcher? I don’t know…
Signed,
Awesome Student
________________________________________
From: Ms. B.
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 11:07 AM
To: Awesome Student
Subject: Re: Titles
I love the word Jaunty, but Jean tells me who the character in the story is. We already know that any story is going to be about a character, so sometimes just a word about a character doesn’t give us much to imagine plot-wise. That’s why it’s best to think about the whole story – the adventure, the plot, to get a title that hints at the whole thing. What kind of adventure/experience did Jean have? Can you think of any nouns that would be synonyms for Jean’s experience? Then look that word up in the SF (or go to http://thesaurus.reference.com/) to find a matching word that starts with J or the soft G sound.
Like Adventure could turn into:
The Jaunty Journey
or then I thought he had a day – a lucky day – and so I looked up lucky at http://thesaurus.reference.com/ and found
The Jaunty Jackpot
Which is good and can work just fine, but you may not like it. Afterall, Jean was Jaunty but maybe the Jackpot was something else.
So I went to http://thesaurus.reference.com/ and looked up Jaunty and found
nothing.
So then I thought, well Jean wasn’t all that bright, so I looked up stupid and found
words that I liked like feebleminded and hairbrained and thought
Hey, he made a fortune, so it could be called
The Feebleminded Fortune.
That has a nice ring to it! I could stop here, but then I thought, what if I do that with the word Windfall? But then I would have to change the adjective to a W word, but when I looked up Windfall, I came back to Jackpot. Or I could go with Hairbrained and look at H words. If I wasn’t satisfied yet, I would keep looking like this until I found a title that satisfied me. But eventually, I would have to stop and just pick the one I liked the best 
Sincerely,
Ms. B.