Why are these titles grammatically correct? [duplicate]

grammaticality titles syntactic-analysis is-it-a-sentence

I frequently come across titles that are hard for me to make sense of in grammatical terms. These titles sound like questions or incomplete sentences to me. For example: "How Social Media Affects Young People's Attitudes" or "Why Cognitive Load Affects Decision Making"

I would like to know how and why these titles are correct. Thank you.


They are incomplete sentences. Titles don't have to be complete sentences to make sense. For example, they could even be just names of characters or objects.

What's going on grammatically though is that they are subordinate clauses and the main clause is merely understood. At its most basic form, it could be something like "This is an article" or "I discuss."

Examples from your titles:

  1. [This article discusses] How Social Media Affects Young People's Attitudes

  2. [I am talking about] Why Cognitive Load Affects Decision Making

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