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All The Tropes:What Do I Call This Entry?: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|'''''Q:''' What makes a good entry title?
'''''A:''' Short and snappy.''}}▼
▲A: Short and snappy.
You are building a handle that can be used to pick up a concept and carry it around. If the title does not fit in a sentence, it isn't of much use. A title like [[Genre Blindness]] almost doesn't need an entry to carry the concept. If you can boil it down to a noun and an adjective, or even better ''just'' a noun or adjective, you've got winner.
See also [[Trope Namer Syndrome]] and [[Everything's Worse With Snowclones]].
== But Not ''Too'' Short ==
If you shorten the proposed name down to a TLA, expect somebody to come along and move your trope to make way for a disambiguation page. There are only 17,576 possible Three-Letter Abbreviations, after all - by now, most of them mean more than one thing, and what comes to mind when you think of a TLA isn't necessarily what comes to somebody else's mind. (For example, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who hear "BFG" and don't immediately think of [[Roald Dahl]]'s book ''Big Friendly Giant''.)
Make sure the trope name means something on its own.
== And Doesn't Mean Something Else ==
Related to the Three-Letter Abbreviations issue, there are some phrases that already have generally-accepted meanings in [[Real Life]], and if your trope name is one of those phrases, people are going to think of the real-world meaning before they think of your meaning.
As an example, consider Mr. Miyagi from ''[[The Karate Kid]]'': he's a martial-arts master, and he's old. So he's an "old master", right? Well, no. In Real Life, an [[wikipedia:Old Master|Old Master]] is a European "painter of skill" who worked before the 18th century, or an artwork from such an artist. So "old master" is a bad name for an elderly martial-arts master, no matter what [[The Other Tropes Wiki]] thinks.
Before you commit yourself to using a particular title, do a web search on it. Chances are that you won't get any results, but if you do — especially if you get a Wikipedia match for it — make sure your name actually means what you think it means... and if it ''doesn't'' mean what you think it means, pick a different title.
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''For brainstorming on an idea, see the [[:Forum:Trope Talk|Trope Talk forum]] and the [[:Category:Trope Workshop|Trope Workshop]].''
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