“Nortel Achieves 3.6 Megabits Per Second HSDPA Data Call With Qualcomm”

This is the opening line of a press release that I received on 29th November.

Everything in this sentence - the headline of the whole press release - makes no sense to me at all but probably made sense to the person who wrote it.

The important thing is to think about who might be reading it and write for them. This involves a leap of imagination but you can simulate this to some extent by getting a friendly critic to review press releases before they are sent out.

Everything we produce at Articulate is reviewed by a sub-editor before it is sent to clients to make sure that what we write makes sense. But you don’t need a full-time professional. My wife, a playwright, gets me to read her work.

My recommendation is to use headlines that are likely to make sense to a reasonably-educated reader of a quality newspaper. In this case a possible headline might be something like “Nortel achieves fastest cellphone data connection.”