G'day mate. How's it going? Today, I'm going to talk about why understanding headings are very useful. Without further ado, let's get underway!
When you are reading newspapers, for instance, are you gonna jump the gun to start reading the main paragraphs? No no wait a sec! The best way to get a big picture of what the article is about is to get your head around the given heading, mate. This is because that headings are normally and technically the summation or abstract of what the article is about. So, getting a good understanding of the heading provides you with an opportunity to not just save your time but boost your skimming and scanning skills as well. Ok, but headings are normally extracted from one of the sentences within the article, aren't they? Well, to some extent, yes, but actually not really.
For instance, please have a closer look at the above image. Can you understand and imagine what's happening there? Without reading the main paragraphs, you could still get the hang of almost precisely what the article is going to say, right? How? Well, there's a bunch of information contained herein, aren't there? What you should be doing is to focus on the given heading, and ideally read it aloud to comprehend what's going on there. You could also pick up some keywords such as Brexit trade war, the EU, backfire, Boris Johnson. In fact, due to the very short length of the heading, the sentence itself is entirely the key to understand the article.
Next up, you've got to make sure how headings are written and work, which is a kinda important point to keep in mind. Headings are usually paraphrased that are extracted from one of the key sentences within the article, and also tailor the contents themselves to suit the reader's needs in a sophisticated way. For instance, headings give you more abstract or specific verb that you may not know, but you don't need to worry about it, because you can find a synonym within the article. And, sometimes you can see there's no 3rd person singular "s", and the use of present tense instead of past tense even if the article itself is about the past event. This is dependent on the context and journalist's discretion. But normally the majority of journalists tend to follow this rule. To minimise and shorten the heading, grammatical aspects tend to be ruled out for only headings. So, if you've understood this sort of headings' mechanism, then it's very nice and useful for grasping the big picture of the article, and visualising the scenery of it without going through the article per se.
Thanks for reading my blog. Have a good one.