Headers: What They Are and How to Use Them

What is a header?

A header is an organization unit similar to an outline level, not a method of enlarging your text.

What should you use headers?

You use it to apply titles, subtitles, sections, and subsections to your work.

How long should my headers be?

This is a bit difficult to answer. Headers are unique and should give additional meaning to your writing. If truncating your header reduces its meaning, you should leave it alone. However, many search engines and other web crawlers display header levels, and most cut them off somewhere between 65 and 100 characters. Keep this in mind when writing for the web and make sure the first portion of your headers is meaningful.

Writing with Header Levels

Start with your outline; use your outline to layout your header levels. Each level of your outline is a different header level. Convert your outline text into meaningful titles and subtitles as you go. You should not use your outline text as the text for the header because your outline should be more detailed than your title or subtitle. Layout your document using your headers prior to writing your text. This makes it easier to navigate within your document while you are writing and helps you retain some structure. Remember, it is easier to delete something you dislike than it is to remember something you forgot.

Word Processing Header Usage

Most word processing programs, including OpenOffice, Word, and Word Perfect, offer an outline view. This view is actually a header view and is quite useful for laying your documents. It is not a true outline. You should not outline using this view. Using header levels consistently throughout your document gives you several advantages.

The first advantage is styling. You should never style any document by highlighting the text and selecting a font, font size, and weight. You should use your styles. For example, my document title is Header 1, and all my chapters are Header 2. My chapters should be centered Times New Roman, size 16, and bold. Instead of highlighting each chapter title and applying this style individually, which on a large document would be very time consuming, open the style bar and edit the Header 2 style once. Now, every Header 2 in my document has the required style. This principle applies to every element of your composition, including footnotes, endnotes, subscripts, tables, and paragraphs. The only time you should highlight the text and change its font is when you want to apply particular emphasis to a phrase or passage. Even then, you are better off if you create a custom style called “emphasize” or “quotation box”. This will help maintain consistent styles throughout your document.

The second advantage is generating tables of contents, indexes, tables of figures, and tables of authorities. Style levels actually mark many of these in advance. By using captions under your figures, you allow the word processing program to identify all the figures in your document and generate a list with the figure name and location. The same applies to the others.

The final major advantage is managing citation layouts. There many tools, including EndNote, ProCite, and Zotero, that manage citations and automatically insert them as footnotes, endnotes, and/or internal citations. All of these tools use defined styles to style your citations, and you can edit these styles. This includes things like indenting all lines after the first line of the citation in the bibliography and adding a tab before the number in footnotes. Just a note, if you need to underline all book titles and your book title citations are currently in italics, you should edit the style template output (ex. APA) defined in the program. For consistency reasons, you should not edit these in the word processor.

Print Header Usage

In print publications, headers are used to organize content into easily digestible chunks and in some cases, help readers skim the content. Most textbooks contain excellent examples of proper header usage. Multiple header levels are not typically used in fiction writing. This is probably because people are less likely to skim fiction. They are much more important in non-fiction, and many reference works would be difficult, if not impossible, to use without them.

Web Writing Header Usage

In web writing, it is particularly important to use headers properly. People read web pages differently than print publications and are more likely to skim your page for relevant information. Headers help them skim.

Search engines display header levels in their search results. This means yours headers should be relevant to your content and the first 65 to 100 characters should be the most meaningful. Preferably, your headers should be short and to the point.

Many visually-impaired people use screen readers to navigate the web. For them, headers are extremely important because they offer an additional level of navigation embedded within your content. Without proper header usage, your main content will be difficult to navigate for these people and you cannot tell from web statics how many people accessing your site use this technology.

This post is an example of proper header usage.

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