Melanie Spiller and Coloratura Consulting
Copyright 2020 Melanie Spiller. All rights reserved.
Headings and Titles
Melanie Spiller and Coloratura Consulting
Headings and Titles are unique tools for telling your readers what will follow. Use these simple tools to
guide your readers down a path of your design.
Content
If you’ve been reading my blogs, you know that I encourage writers to create an outline. Many of your
headings can come straight from the outline. Outline entries are often succinct and descriptive, exactly the
qualities you want in a heading.
The more brief you can be, and the more direct, the more likely your reader will either be pulled into the
piece, or be able to scan for the salient bits that interest him. Your heading should summarize the section to
follow or announce the presence of an important topic within. The more narrowly your heading describes the
subject in the section to follow, the more likely it is that you’ve written tight prose as well. Be succinct and
descriptive.
If you can’t borrow from your outline, perhaps you could wait until you’ve written the section, and then
stick the heading in when you know what you’ve said in the section. It’s certainly possible to insert headings
after writing a whole piece or chapter, if your outline’s entries are too general.
If the tone of your piece is light-hearted, it’s okay to be cute in your headings. But if you’re writing a serious
discussion of a highly technical nature, don’t distract the reader from what you’ve written by how you’ve
written it. It’s a rare person who can be dignified and command respect while wearing a white belt with plaid
pants and a paisley shirt, right?
If your headings are clever rather than informative, you can be sure that many readers will quit before
making it to the end of your piece.
Frequency
Some publications, like newspapers, newsletters, e-zines, and magazines, want a heading every couple of
paragraphs. These readers are in a hurry and want the essence of the story without any fuss. Readers who
aren’t in a hurry also like to know where they are headed.
If you’re writing a book, headings should occur about every page and a half to two pages—frequent enough
that the reader can take breaks, not so frequent that they interrupt the flow of the content.
Styles and Fonts
Most publications provide templates with heading styles assigned in advance. The title of the piece is styled
as Heading 1. No other heading is Heading 1, only the title of the piece. I have yet to work with a publisher
who played by different rules.
The next most important section is assigned Heading 2, and any subheadings take Heading 3 or 4, and even
deeper, if the template design accommodates it. By “most important,” I mean regarding the levels in an
outline.
Introduction
Prerequisites
Set Up
Basic Usage
Powering Up
Pre-Assigned Priorities
Permissions and Security
Rights, Roles, and Groups
Rights
Roles
Groups
Making Changes
Advanced Usage
In that little outline, the Introduction and the Basic and Advanced Usage headings are to be styled Heading 2
in the text. The headings for Prerequisites, Set Up, Powering Up, and Permissions and Security are styled
Heading 3. Pre-assigned Priorities, Rights, Roles and Groups, and Making Changes are styled Heading 4.
The remaining Rights, Roles, and Groups are Heading 5, unless it’s not an option to go that deep, in which
case they will either be promoted or deleted, depending on what does the most service to the reader and the
topic at hand.
Each level is assigned a Heading style so that readers can tell what section is a subsection of another. It’s
important that you use the Heading styles based on their Heading numbers and not based on what they look
like. The layout process reads the style of the heading and assigns the correct look, not the word processing
program you’re using. It is a rare publisher who uses a word processing program to determine their final
look.
Don’t leapfrog headings. In other words, don’t skip a Heading 3 and use a Heading 4, just because the topic
is less important than some other topic. If you find yourself leapfrogging, there’s probably something wrong
with your piece’s structure. You’ll also seldom find a stack of Heading 2s comprising the whole of an article.
You can, however, jump from any depth back up to Heading 2.
Punctuation and Capitalization
Titles and Headings get what is known as Title Case, which means that the initial letter of most words are
capitalized. The first word of a title or heading is always capitalized, no matter what it is. Internally, don’t
capitalize prepositions (at, to, by, etc.), articles (a, an, the), or coordinating conjunctions (with, between,
etc.). Capitalize both parts of a hyphenated word, unless the second word is only a modifier (e.g., English-
speaking).
Use all capital letters only for acronyms and names of companies or software that have branded their names
with all capital letters.
Titles and headings never get periods, even if they are complete sentences. They do get question marks or
exclamation points, as warranted.
It’s okay to use commas, semi-colons, quotation marks, and other forms of punctuation in titles and
headings. Colons are welcome, especially if they are between a term and its definition. Unlike in regular
sentences, capitalize the first word after a colon, no matter what it is. Use a colon before a subtitle (e.g.,
Chant: The Spirit of Sound). Do not use quotation marks unless you are actually quoting something.
Titles as References
Within the body of your work, you may need to refer to titles and headings of other works. These take
special treatment.
Use italics for:
Titles of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers
Titles of plays, long collections of poetry, epic poems, or musical compositions of several
movements or substantial length (rock and roll tunes do not qualify.)
Titles of movies, films, and television and radio programs
Titles of paintings, drawings, statues, and other works of art
Use quotation marks for:
Titles of articles, chapter or part titles, and short stories or essays
Titles of songs