David Mitchell

Subheading context

is not a good subheading! It’s not the worst either. But it’s the kind of thing I see a lot in student work and in published academic writing. It’s a fragment. ‘Context’ is a vague and overused word, including by me. No subheading is needed here anyway, not even ‘introduction’, since this first bit could only be an introduction.

Plus, how could something like a ‘subheading’ have a ‘context’? This subheading is the writer telling themselves that they are writing the opening bit. But it’s not helpful for the reader.

Doing good work

is another bad one, meaningless without explanation. (Read on to see where it comes from.)

I’m fan of subheadings. If a writer is not using subheadings, it may well mean they do not have clear, discrete thoughts with a logical flow and are trying to hide this from the reader.

But only recently has it struck me that subheadings must do much more than exist. They must do good work.

To illustrate all this, I’ll use a book that happens to be sitting beside me, a large, edited book about conflict resolution.

Examples of effective subheadings

That was a good one, I hope? It orients us to what is coming up in this section, and links back to the overall topic of the blog post. It is what we expect – a good feature of a subheading. Academic subheadings are not the place to be teasing, surprising, or arty.

My exemplar is a chapter on gender mainstreaming. The subheadings are:

Introduction

The roots of gender mainstreaming

The goal of gender mainstreaming

The practice of gender mainstreaming

Challenges to gender mainstreaming

Conclusion

Wonderful. We can see the land. We can see the horizon. There are even townspeople waving. We know where we are. Each subheading labels an aspect of the topic, and together they build up a picture of the whole.

Examples of ineffective subheadings

By contrast, the following package of subheadings, from a chapter elsewhere in this volume, is not so helpful:

Introduction

The identity paradigm

Stages of development as ongoing life projects

Basic human needs in Eriksonian perspective

Generativity crisis

Political ideas

Supervise the storytellers

Conclusion

The horizon is covered in a thick fog and we are drifting. Help! These subheadings have different structures, and it is not clear how they all link up and help to unfurl the theme of the chapter.

Now, you might say, just read the text, and it will all make sense. It might. But subheadings need to tell a story in themselves because the first thing the reader will do is scan them to see if this chapter is worth giving time to.

We’ve a million other texts to read. We need to smash the glass case, grab what we need, and get out of there. Let’s not make the reader work. As Stephen King wrote about fiction, the only thing the reader should have to do is turn the page.

Conclusion

is a very good subheading. It works for the reader, and it forces the writer to make sure they do have a conclusion.

And so my conclusion is this: first, make subheadings display a line of reasoning and relate to each other; second, don’t use word fragments but properly label what the section is about; third, use them to open up the overall topic. And don’t forget the…

References