[imagesource:flickr]

Writing headlines can be an interesting exercise if you work in a newsroom. It is after all the first thing people see when looking at your site or newspaper (they do still exist), so to ‘get’em hooked’ you have to dig around in your bag of grammatical tricks.

Headlines tell you if a story is worth reading, and sometimes the story itself is so big that the most powerful headline can be a simple one or two-word sentence – think for instance of the New York Herald headline on May 7, 1945, that read “Victory”, or the News of the World cover of 31 August 1997 proclaiming “Diana Dead”.

For history’s biggest days, headlines simply emphasised what the world already knew. But some of our favourite headlines are the ones so intriguing that you must read the article. Here we think of a recent one in the Independent that reads: “Wife Stabs Husband With Squirrel”. Would you click on that story? You betcha.

With our shortening attention span, headlines have become the new long-form, so, seeing as there are many people out there who struggle to read beyond a headline, we thought it a fun exercise to take a look at some of our favourites , like “Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead”, “Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says”, and “Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures”.

And then there are these beauties:

A special shoutout to this gem below. Notice the clever subheading in the second column which merely reads “Bastard”. This is why people go to journalism school.

Please spare a thought for the creative geniuses who make us all laugh or cry the next time you read a headline that grabs you.

[source:quora]