How to Win Papers and Influence Professors: Creating Positive First Impressions through Effective Titles

By the time you finish reading this first sentence, you’ve already started forming a first impression about this article. In fact, you really started forming it after reading the title. With the words, “How to Win Papers and Influence Professors,” a spoof on the popular Dale Carnegie book, “How to Win Friends & Influence People,” I already began establishing a tone and setting up expectations for you, the reader. Whether you realized it or not, you had a reaction to that title. This shouldn’t come as a great shock. It’s human nature to form quick first impressions; we’ve all been told early in our lives that first impressions are especially important because they tend to last a long time.