Homework question: snappy titles, "hooks." What's this about?

I don’t know why they have moved that direction in English-type courses, but it’s not that way in every dicipline. Any work that is done in the sciences still follows the form you detailed for the scholarly discussion. For some reason, general writing courses, literature courses, and the like have moved to the “magazine” approach. I personally prefer the scholarly stuff, so it’s probably good I’m in the sciences.

As for when, it’s been this way as long as I remember. They taught us to use snappy titles and hooks when I was in elementary school. The first year I remember being taught writing was third grade, so they made the shift sometime before ‘96.

I’m in no way a teacher or instructor, but the requirements for your essay seem to mirror what we see in so many other areas of our lives these days.

Look at resumes, for example, and the time and effort spent on formatting, fonts, white space, stationery selection, a ‘hook’ in the cover letter, etc.

In fact, at this time of year in an even-numbered year in the US, you don’t need to look any further than our political “debates” and advertising. Where’s the content? It’s all about the hook, the grabber, the big, quick and expansive statement, the sound bite.

Marketing rules, unfortunately. Advertising moves product. I guess that’s the lesson.

I’m a double-major in English and Women’s Studies (read: I do a LOT of writing) at my university, and I have never seen those requirements for any of the papers I have ever written. They’re supposed to be scholarly and, as you said, a dignified, academic approach to the material. The essays and research papers I have written have always been graded on how well I argue for and support my thesis, not on how “grabby” the topic is. It’s unfortunate that you are in a class that puts such importance on such trivial things as snappy titles and “hooks.” The instructor obviously has little respect for academia and little interest in producing quality writers.

@Jeruba Now, come on. Just get on with your homework and stop dithering. ;-)

Perhaps it’s just a matter of terminology.

snappy -> concise
hook -> thesis statement

Maybe the requirements are the same but the way that the assessors talk about them has changed.

Just a suggestion.

I don’t know, but I think your snappy essay title should be “Essays for Dummies!” and your hook should be, “Even the sacred halls of our most cherished learning institutions have fallen prey to the seductive siren call of shallow American tabloid journalism.”

That’s great, @MissAusten. The essay, however, is about the first five plays we’ve read for the class and not the topic of my question. Perhaps there’s an article in there, though.

I think this desire for snappy titles and hooks might have been influenced by the publishing and grant writing domains in academia. Furthermore, I think there is a tendency in academia to be more consumer focused than it used to be. Even course names nowadays seem to try to be snappy and attention grabbing.

Just because writing is academic doesn’t mean it should be boring. The state of academic writing is a tragedy and—as far as I can tell—has been for decades. As David Foster Wallace said: “The truth about most US academic prose is appalling—pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipedalian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead.”

Of course making something not boring definitely requires a lot more than a snappy title and a good hook—so I do think it’s a mistake for an assignment to focus heavily on those—but at least they’re are a good place to start. At least teachers are encouraging people to think about the readers is what I’m saying. Focusing exclusively on the title and hook is obviously a mistake. But, in general, I don’t think it would hurt academic papers to dress up a little.