What's in a title?

A few weeks ago I wrote a post (here) about writing my first article or rather my procrastination getting in the way of writing an article.

Today, I started writing that article. I have gone from re-reading the journal's guidelines (choosing a journal is a whole other post!) and reading articles in the journal that were published on my topic.

So, how far did  I really get? A couple of hundred words? Well, eight words to be exact. Yes, eight. The eight words that I wrote formed the title. Okay, okay, it wasn't a whole heap of new writing on my topic BUT it was a new title.

I recently read a book by Professor Anne Sigismund Huff called Writing for Scholarly Publication (1999). Amongst many good writing points Anne makes, writing effective titles is one of them. She suggests writing down seven possible titles before making a decision. I wrote a bunch of titles down weeks ago and it is only today that I have thought 'you know, that sums up what I am writing about'. And it is now my working title - to be changed as needed.

How long did it take you to decide on your article title or even your thesis title?