Two Column Question

[Bruce Pourciau]

A colleague of mine has a LaTeX question. In the past (about five  
years ago), he would use \twocolumn[header text], with the title,  
author, and abstract substituted in as the header text, to get the  
title, author, and abstract at the top of the page and written across  
the width of the page before the two columns begin. Now he's been  
trying to do the same thing and it's producing error messages about  
missing braces.

Anyone know what the problem might be? Has there been a change in the  
syntax requirement for \twocolumn?

Thanks for any suggestions,

Bruce