Central Station / YPM-FEATURE-TITLE-COACHING

Title coaching and requirements

features/title-coaching.md · Updated 2026-05-01
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Summary

Encourage / require titles, coach good titling

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Open questions 2 items
  1. 1 Required by default, or per-AssignmentType opt-in? Probably opt-in — teachers should choose.
  2. 2 AI-suggested titles based on the essay's content?
Spec body Markdown
# Title coaching and requirements

Many student essays come in untitled or with placeholder titles. Yawp could (a) require a title, (b) coach the student toward a good title, or (c) both.

## Problem

Today titles are optional and often skipped or poorly done. The downstream effects ripple:

- Untitled essays clutter the gradebook.
- Submitted titles sometimes get lost ([bugs/title-disappears-on-submit.md](../bugs/title-disappears-on-submit.md)).
- The GA mistakes the title for a sentence and flags it as a fragment ([bugs/ga-title-marked-fragment.md](../bugs/ga-title-marked-fragment.md)).
- Students aren't being coached on titling — a real writing skill.

## Goals (rough)

- Optionally require a title before submission (per AssignmentType setting).
- Coach good titling — capitalization, no trailing punctuation, evocative rather than literal, etc.
- Get the title properly registered in the document model so downstream surfaces (gradebook, GA) treat it as a title.

## Open questions

- [ ] Required by default, or per-AssignmentType opt-in? Probably opt-in — teachers should choose.
- [ ] AI-suggested titles based on the essay's content?

## Engineering handoff

Not ready. Idea-stage. Coordinate with the title bug fixes.
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