Student writers tend to slap a title on their papers just before selecting the "print"  command.  This is a very bad move.  Titles are vital--they are the reader's first encounter with the paper, and they are the first opportunity to communicate the paper's topic and possibly even provide a sense of its argument.  Think for a moment about how important titles are in the things you read, how often you have made a decision to read or not read something based solely on its title.  Professors have to read your paper even if your title is dreadful, but a bad title makes a bad first impression and leads us to expect a bad paper.

There are three kinds of titles you must avoid.  One is to use as your title the title of the work you're writing about.  A paper on Hamlet cannot itself be titled "Hamlet" or "Shakespeare's Hamlet."  Sorry, but Shakespeare got there first--you'll have to exercise your brain a bit and develop something of your own.  More to the point, neither "Hamlet" nor "Shakespeare's Hamlet" gives the reader any clue as to what aspect of Hamlet the paper is going to discuss.  So in developing your own title you'll also want at least to indicate a more specific topic--say, "Fathers and Sons in Hamlet."

The second is a title like "An Analysis (or Discussion or Interpretation or Investigation, etc.) of Hamlet."  It goes without saying that your paper on Hamlet will analyze (or discuss or interpret or investigate, etc.) the play.  What doesn't go without saying is, again, the specific aspect of the play you're going to analyze.

The third kind of title to avoid is the creative title that means something to you but not to the reader.  Your first responsibility in writing a title for an academic paper is to make clear what the paper's topic is.  This usually requires naming the author(s) and/or the work(s).  If you can also be creative and clever, that's wonderful, but if you're creative and clever without being clear then the reader is not going to appreciate your creativity and cleverness.  Not long ago, for example, I received a paper with the title, "She Loves Him, She Loves Him Not."  Clever, but how would a reader ever know that this was a paper about the relationship between Dido and Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid?

So, how do you develop a good title?  For starters, most writers think about titles and are on the lookout for them while they're working on the paper--they don't put it off to the end.  Taking some time to brainstorm about the title and to generate a list of different possibilities is also a good strategy.  Begin by making sure your title contains the author/work and your topic--"Fathers and Sons in Hamlet" may not be exciting, but it gives the reader an idea of what will follow.  A popular technique is to use as a title a phrase from the work that is related to your topic or that appears in a key passage, and then to provide a subtitle that indicates more straightforwardly the author/work and topic.  For example: "'A Little More Than Kin':  Fathers and Sons in Hamlet."  (Note the quotation marks around the phrase from the play, and the colon separating title and subtitle.)  The Virgil paper mentioned above could also have been improved in this way: "She Loves Him, She Loves Him Not: Dido's Changing Love for Aeneas in The Aeneid."