All The Tropes:Clear, Concise, Witty
The official TV Tropes trope-naming mantra, signature line of the tropes webmaster Fast Eddie, and laconic guidelines of Naming a Trope. These are to trope names much as Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are to Artificial Intelligence:
- The name of a trope must be clear, so that readers can intuitively guess the definition at a glance;
- The name of a trope should be concise, so long as conciseness does not conflict with clarity, defined above;
- The name of a trope should aim for witty, provided it does not conflict with either of the first two.
The specific order of these items is very important: Names that fail in clarity will attract misuse more often than names which are overly long (but clear), or so clinically devoid of humor that it should be a crime. It's no mere hyperbole, either, but a proven fact of our Trope Repair Shop -- renames are proposed (and evaluated) on the grounds of active misuse or misleading titles more often than any other criterion.