Titles, Headings And What They Promise

Headings are usually written last and treated as labels. Readers use them as navigation and as promises, which makes them more consequential than that.

Readers use headings to decide

Few people read a long document straight through. They scan the headings, decide which sections are relevant, and read those closely.

That behaviour means the headings are the only part guaranteed to be read, and a document whose headings are uninformative is effectively unnavigable.

It also means the headings should make sense read consecutively, since for many readers that sequence is the entire document.

Statements beat labels

A heading reading "Background" tells a reader nothing they could not have guessed. One stating what the background establishes tells them whether to read it.

The difference is between naming a topic and making a claim, and the second carries information at no extra length.

This is why the strongest section headings can often be read alone as a summary of the argument.

A heading is a promise about content

Readers arriving at a section expect what the heading indicated, and a mismatch is experienced as being misled rather than as a small imprecision.

The common version of this is a heading written before the section, which then developed in another direction and was never revisited.

Rereading headings against their finished sections is a short task that catches a disproportionate share of reader confusion.

Titles do a different job

A title has to work for people who have not read anything yet, so it must convey subject and interest simultaneously with no context to lean on.

Titles that overstate cost more than they gain. A reader who finds the piece does not deliver what was promised discounts everything else in it.

Specific titles outperform clever ones in almost every setting, because a reader deciding in a second needs to know what the piece is about.

Hierarchy has to be real

Levels of heading tell a reader how sections relate, and using them inconsistently destroys that information quickly.

A subsection should genuinely sit inside its parent, and a document where the levels drift becomes harder to follow than one with no subdivisions at all.

The simplest defence is fewer levels. Two are enough for most documents, and a piece needing four usually needs restructuring rather than more headings.

Deep hierarchies also tend to hide the argument. A reader scanning four levels of heading sees an outline of the filing rather than an outline of the thinking.