What’s in a Title?_{The T.I.T.L.E. Framework for Scholars Writing in English Language and Literature}

If you are reading this, you have probably already written a working title for your thesis, dissertation, or paper — and you are not entirely happy with it, likely because conventions vary widely between dissertations and journal articles (Hao, 2024; Hao & Jiang, 2025; Slougui, 2018). That is a normal place to be. Most postgraduate researchers spend months living inside their data, their theory, and their arguments, and then are asked, almost as an afterthought, to compress all of it into a single line.

This book exists because that compression is a real skill. Like any real skill, it can be taught, practiced, and improved. This book is written for master's and doctoral students across disciplines — from laboratory sciences to literary studies, from education to engineering. It assumes no prior training in academic writing beyond what you already picked up along the way. If you are writing in a second or third language, you will find a chapter written specifically for you (Chapter 5), because the mistakes that trip up multilingual researchers are not the same mistakes that trip up native speakers. They deserve their own treatment, not a footnote (Jasrial et al., 2024; Ma, 2020; Phyo et al., 2024).