---
title: "Subheadings: Perhaps the Most Useful Technique in Technical Writing"
date: 2013-08-23
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2013/08/23/subheadings-perhaps-the-most-useful-technique-in-technical-writing/
---
# Subheadings: Perhaps the Most Useful Technique in Technical Writing
> 

> - 
> The answer is buried in a long page, but the user only spends 2 minutes max on a page scanning.
> 

> - 
> The help has been fragmented and dispersed over many small topics so the help is a maze.
> 

> 

In other words, help is either too long so users can't find the answer, or help is too short so users can't find the answer. Is this a paradox that is resolvable? Can something be both long and short at the same time?

I've talked about [progressive disclosure and dropdown hotspots](https://idratherbewriting.com/2012/08/09/applying-progressive-information-disclosure-to-online-help-navigation/) before, as well as [long topics](https://idratherbewriting.com/2013/05/06/why-long-topics-are-better-for-the-user/) and [short topics](https://idratherbewriting.com/2013/05/05/do-short-topics-make-information-more-findable/). I don't want to rehash any of those same points. Onward I go into new territory!

## Subheadings provide a solution to page length

Remember that my poll is what tech writers *perceive* to be reasons users can't find answers in help, not what users *actually* think, or any objective measure of why users can't find the answers (for that information, I would need to do real research, and as a blogger, I'm allowed free license to speculate).

Instead, I give you the easy answer to the problem of article length. What we simply need is a mechanism to facilitate scanning. Fortunately this mechanism has already been established — instead of long walls of text that are hard to scan, we break up information with **subheadings**. Subheadings are one of the most helpful and simple techniques for writing.

I actually only learned to love subheadings through blogging. I didn't learn the subheading in college. For some reason, academics prefer long paragraphs and almost no subheadings (kind of like an imitation of the novels professors assign).

And my first technical writing job taught me to break up information into the table of contents feature in the sidebar, so that all hierarchy was a never-ending set of expandable and collapsable little sidebar folders.

It wasn't until I started writing lengthy posts on my blog that I started really using subheadings — usually separating every couple of paragraphs with a new subheading.

## Subheadings make it easy to expand content

Almost any Wikipedia page provides a great example of subheadings in action. There we have many paragraphs of content broken up by subheadings, with a built-in navigation embedded at the top. It's a model that seems to work well on the web.

Why does Wikipedia use this structure? Wikipedia articles are often written by multiple people, who add information at different points of time. Not all the information fits neatly together into a coherent article. When you read a Wikipedia article, you're not reading an essay in the New Yorker. You're reading a lot of little sub-articles and sub-points about the same topic.

Technical writing has much more in common with Wikipedia than the New Yorker. We often have a laundry list of points to cover about a particular topic, and all those points don't fit neatly into one coherent and flowing article.

Additionally, we often add the points over time, as new issues crop up, or as questions or problems arise. We need to suddenly bolt on some more information about "Widget X" because we find out more details about its use (such as incompatibility with a certain browser) and users need to know, so we add a new section ("Browser support for Widget X"). The new section doesn't necessarily follow logically from the old one, nor does it have to.

Subheadings provide a way to easily expand the existing article in substantial ways, without worrying about clear transitions between the sections. The subheadings themselves are the transitions! It's a lazy person's style of writing because the order of the subsections themselves doesn't often matter. They are like little children beneath a parent. The children can stand in a variety of orders, none particularly correct, because each subsection is an independent sub-thought.

And while the subheading method of organization may seem lazy, it actually supports the way people read technical material -- by scanning and looking for specific answers.

## Subheadings solve writer's block

Subheadings also solve writer's block. Have you ever opened a blank document and wondered where and how to begin writing? Subheadings make it easy to fill up a page. Instead of taking a stab at that first sentence and hoping you fall into a rhythmic flow of sentence after sentence, instead just make a laundry list of the points you want to cover. Group the points into main subheadings, which you list on the page. Then start filling in the spaces below the subheadings.

Subheadings are like the framing on a house. Once the frame is in place, you just fill in it in with insulation and drywall (the text). Try adding your insulation and drywall before you have a frame to hang them on, though, and you're in for a real challenge.