This reminds me of a paper that was published in Nature a while back called “Use Machine Learning to Find Energy Materials”. Scientific writing is so heavily steeped in the passive voice that it was shocking to read a title that was active, even imperative.
The author goes on to write the entire article in the same style, with short, active sentences - subject, verb, period. It felt like they wrote it and proofread it to ensure that every single sentence was as abrupt and pointed as possible, almost as a game. Very interesting writing style all things considered.
Academic CS has its share of whimsical titles; these are Conor McBride’s specialty[1], although he’s not at all the only practitioner[2,3]. In other areas it’s not as common, but I could name some famous physics[4] or maths papers. Titles that are not whimsical but straight to the point also do occur[5,6], and so do subtler jokes[7,8].
[7] “(Para)bosons, (para)fermions, quons and other beasts in the menagerie of particle statistics”, Greenberg, Greenberger, Greenbergest, https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9306225
The author goes on to write the entire article in the same style, with short, active sentences - subject, verb, period. It felt like they wrote it and proofread it to ensure that every single sentence was as abrupt and pointed as possible, almost as a game. Very interesting writing style all things considered.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07820-6