Headings are very useful in technical writing. They:

• offer main concepts succinctly
• alert readers to upcoming topics and subtopics
• break up long stretches of text
• help readers locate specific information quickly
• make the text easy to navigate

As a reader, look at the Environmental Health page from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy People site. Headings make it easy to see the scope of information on the page, as well as locate a section of information that interests you. Headings make the page readable and accessible.

Headings are also useful to you as a writer. They keep you organized and focused on the topic. When you begin using headings, your impulse may be to create headings after you’ve written the rough draft. Instead, anticipate the headings before you start the rough draft, and use them to keep you on track as you write. If you outline your document, you can often extract headings from your outline, as headings are main ideas.

General Guidelines for Headings

Headings are so important that there are a number of guidelines that deal with heading content, level, language use, and conventions.

Heading Content

• Use headings to identify the major sections and subsections of a report.
• Make headings indicate the range of topic coverage in the section. For example, if the section covers the design and operation of a pressurized water reactor, the heading “Pressurized Water Reactor Design” would be incomplete and misleading, since it does not include the concept of operation.

Heading Level

• Use a different style for each level of heading: main headings within the text (not the same as the title), second level, third level, etc. That does not always mean that you need to use different fonts; you can choose different sizes, colors, or capitalization. Apply each heading style consistently throughout the document.
• Consider “run-in” headings (words in bold or color that actually start a sentence) only if you have a lot of heading levels. Run-in headings can help you avoid the problem of too many lower-level headings looking alike.
• Use actual headings as much as possible instead of bold or italic text, for accessibility.

Heading Language

• Use specific, self-explanatory language in headings. For example, instead of “Background” or “Technical Information,” use “Physics of Fiber Optics.”
• When possible, omit articles from the beginning of headings to be as concise as possible. For example, “The Pressurized Water Reactor” can easily be changed to “Pressurized Water Reactors.”
• Use parallel phrasing in the same level of heading, e.g., all -ing words, or all noun phrases.

Heading Conventions

• Avoid stacked headings—any two consecutive headings without intervening text.
• Avoid a lone heading by itself without another like it in the same section. If you don’t have enough content for two headings, then you may not need a heading.
• Avoid “widows and orphans” in headings, when a heading occurs at the bottom of a column or page and the text it introduces starts at the top of the next column or page. Make sure to have at least two lines of text after the heading if the heading occurs toward the end of a page, or else put the heading and its text on a new page.
• Avoid pronoun reference to headings. For example, if you have a heading “Torque,” don’t begin the sentence following it with something like “This is a physics principle…..” Don’t assume that a reader will relate the pronoun “this” to the heading “Torque.”
• Don’t use headings as titles for tables or figures.

•  A very general guideline for reports and longer documents is to have two-three headings per regular page of text. Note that this is a guideline only, but you get the idea that you should have a few sections and headings on most pages of text in longer documents, as opposed to either a block of text, or too many sections and headings.

Check out the Purdue Online Writing Lab page on APA Headings and Seriation for details and examples of headings in APA style.

Common Problems with Headings

Problems occur with headings when they are too wordy, not parallel in language, not clearly representative of their information, or not comply with general heading guidelines in some way.  The following diagram points out some common heading problems.