Headings are your friend

Welcome back to formatting school. Formatting, to paraphrase myself from the last newsletter, is the everything else part of writing and we tend to undervalue it.

"Formatting is not copywriting, you witch! Get back to the writing part!" the angry reader hissed.

"Silence! I'm the witch of this realm and I say formatting is relevant enough to be part of this series!" I replied, drawing my staff and casting a spell of obedience upon you.

Give them a heads up

Anyway. This week’s formatting lesson is all about headings. Headings are an incredible tool for improving comprehension as your reader wanders through your writing.

Have you ever heard of the doorway effect? It's also called location updating effect. I personally call it the Am I a Sim? effect. It's the idea that when you walk through a doorway, something funky happens to your brain and you forget why you entered the room. Don't worry, it's mostly been debunked and we're probably not all Sims. Probably.

But if you think of your email or blog or report as a series of rooms that the user moves through, headings can help your reader stay on track as they move through the castle of your words.

Using headings

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when using headings:

• Use as many heading as you need to make your writing easy to comprehend - the limit does not exist

• If you're writing a blog or a searchable piece of content, use the heading tags (like h1, h2, h3 etc.)

• Use bold, not italics, to emphasise your heading if you don't have any other formatting options

• Keep headings short - they're way-finding signs, not summaries

TL;DR? Use headings liberally to help readers parse your writing easily.