This is a transcript of one of the videos in the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
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Just a few more thoughts about headings.
No more than a couple of lines long. Otherwise the heading becomes a paragraph.
It’s really good if you can have at least one subheading per page, and that’s just about being kind to your reader. You know what it’s like when you’re confronted with an entire page of text. How confronting that is, so break it up a little bit.
If you are writing a long document, you will probably have a whole bunch of heading ones and heading twos. You’ll have a bit of a hierarchy there. The design or the structure that you see on the screen, I wouldn’t be really happy with that because, look at all the content that’s under the first heading one and there’s no content under the other heading ones. I’d want to rearrange that content so that there is more balance so that there is some good content under each of the heading ones.
Now, if you’re structuring things like that and chunking in this way, I reckon no more than around 7 items in a heading group. We just get a bit confused if it goes beyond that. It’s just got to do with the limitations of our short term memory.
And I reckon no more than about four levels of headings, 4 levels of hierarchy. Keep it to three if you can. We just lose the sense of organisation once we get beyond three or four or five levels of hierarchy.
The other thing I do with headings is I don’t number them to show structure. It’s really difficult to tell the difference between 4.9.6.1 and 2.7.3.2. I’ve got to have all these numbers jumbling around in my head. In the old days when all we had was a typewriter. Often we did that because that was the only tool we had. We’d use numbers to show structure.
But these days we’ve got so many tools with our modern word processors. We’ve got ways of spacing things out, indenting some white space around different things. We’ve got different font styles and size, whole bunch of different ways to show structure. So I think you are far better off using those visual clues for structure rather than just the numbers.
There are a couple of exceptions where I will use numbers. The first one is if I need to show a sequence. So step 1, Step 2, step 3. Numbers are really helpful for that. The other situation is if I need to go back to a particular paragraph for later reference. Sometimes it’s much easier to have the paragraph numbered than to say to somebody hey, have a look at that bit on page 10, around about 2/3 of the way down the page. Now if you have the paragraph numbered that makes it much simpler.
Headings in your document provide important information to your user. They tell them how the information has been organised and where they can find the information that they need.
Using talking headings in your document will also provide them with information. If I’ve got some good talking headings in a document, maybe all I need is to just read the headings and I will get the gist of the entire document. That will be really useful for your user.
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