{"id":857,"date":"2016-09-09T13:03:55","date_gmt":"2016-09-09T12:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/?p=857"},"modified":"2020-07-24T13:19:27","modified_gmt":"2020-07-24T12:19:27","slug":"writing-and-formatting-headings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/2016\/09\/writing-and-formatting-headings\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing and Formatting Headings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Documentation users rely on headings to quickly locate content of interest, so they should be easily identifiable and provide meaningful context\/keywords in a consistent way. Within these golden rules, though, there&#8217;s ample room for customisation to reinforce a particular document\/provider&#8217;s brand.<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Make your headings visually consistent and distinct from your main text. Choosing a different font is a simple first step: ideally, if your body text is serif, choose sans-serif for your headings, and vice-versa. Use a different colour to your body text, but check that your chosen colour is readable in all anticipated delivery formats &#8211; canary yellow might look stunning on <i>your<\/i> screen, but there&#8217;s a good chance it will be unreadable on someone else&#8217;s, and almost invisible when printed greyscale. Beyond that, consider shading, borders, underlines, and fancy things like drop-caps to make your headings distinct.<br \/><strong>ETA:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/fitzpatrickd\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@fitzpatrickd<\/a> provided a link to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.paciellogroup.com\/resources\/contrastanalyser\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">this tool for Windows\/Mac that will let you test content for legibility to folks with colour-blindness and other visual conditions<\/a>, and also made the point that good headings are an essential part of navigation for users relying on screen-readers.<\/li>\n<li>Use similar phrasing in headings that do the same job (usually at the same level). For instructional documentation, for example, chapter titles might use the phrasing &#8220;About Feature X&#8221;, and sub-sections use &#8220;Doing thing Y&#8221; and &#8220;Doing thing Z&#8221;, with sub-sub-sections of &#8220;Example of Y&#8221; and &#8220;Example of Z&#8221;. If you can generate an automatic Table of Contents for your document, a quick scan will let you spot inconsistencies.<\/li>\n<li>Heading numbering can provide valuable context. It&#8217;s not suitable for all documents\/audiences, but where it is appropriate, it allows readers to quickly understand the hierarchy and relationships of sections in a document. This can be especially useful in long online documents where you don&#8217;t have page numbering, need to scroll up\/down a bit to figure out where you are in relation to other sections, or might land in the middle of a section after clicking a link. Most DTP packages and many markup languages have options to number headings automatically: avoid numbering manually &#8211; it&#8217;s a maintenance nightmare.<\/li>\n<li>Use whitespace to make your headings\/section breaks stand out. Indent or outdent headings, or pad with space before\/after. If you&#8217;ve chosen to stick with a similar font, size, and colour for body text and headings, whitespace might be your saving grace.<\/li>\n<li>Use consistent capitalisation: all caps, initial caps, sentence caps, title caps, &#8230; It&#8217;s ok to use a different rule at different heading levels (for example, chapter titles in all caps, heading 1s in sentence caps), but be consistent across headings at the same level.<br \/>\nIf you&#8217;re getting to grips with using a capitalisation system consistently, many online tools will do it for you automatically till you&#8217;ve seen enough examples that it becomes second nature. Here&#8217;s just a couple:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/titlecapitalization.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">titlecapitalization.com<\/a> &#8211; includes options to use AP style or Chicago Manual of Style rules<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/llbest.com\/?P=75\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">llbest.com<\/a> &#8211; all kinds of fun options here, including things like CamelCase, rEVERSE CASE, and the potentially useful option to re-render text that was accidentally typed with the NUM LOCK key on to substitute letters back in instead!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Documentation users rely on headings to quickly locate content of interest, so they should be easily identifiable and provide meaningful context\/keywords in a consistent way. Within these golden rules, though, there&#8217;s ample room for customisation to reinforce a particular document\/provider&#8217;s brand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,29],"tags":[37,58,34],"class_list":["post-857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-writing","category-writing","tag-font","tag-tools","tag-website"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1443,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions\/1443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}