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Comment by akasakahakada | Hacker News Reader

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akasakahakada·

I think the list is a legit showcase of how broken the academia is in case of making titles.

Every book is literally

XXX: YYYYYYYYYYYYY

With nonsense main-title and long as hell sub-title.

Why not put some effort into making a medium length descriptive title all in a single sentence?

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Most academic textbooks are not for general audience.

If the main title and subtitle don’t make any sense to some people, then the author did not write the textbook for that audience.

This feels like the same complaint that you can't gain all the nuance in an article from reading it's headline. A title is there to be eye catching and get you interested in the subject. If you want to know what the book is about read a short synopsis or the table of contents.

This is a legit showcase of how broken American publishing is in case of making titles. This pattern is so typically American than I can immediately identify it, the same way American TV shows or documentaries are esthetically strongly peculiar.

I wrote a paper for a class a few months ago. In a previous life, I was a tech-audience editor that required writing article titles with a hook to lure people into reading. On my first draft of the paper, I used one of these styled titles and the comments that came back said that it was too "flowery"; since it was an academic paper, it should be more like the pattern you indicated. And sure enough, I changed it and all my subsequent papers to that pattern and never got dinged again.

Title styling aside, MIT Press is an excellent publisher.

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