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5 Steps to Creating Audience Focused Report Writing Headings

By Andrew Jackson

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 14Jul2010 Word count: 724 Viewed: 473 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

As a reader, you've doubtless experienced the following frustration. A big, thick report lands on your desk or a massive Word attachment drops into your email inbox. Most of its content is irrelevant to you, but there are several key points you do need to know about. You head to the appropriate chapters or sections only to spend forever trying to find the few pieces of information you actually need to read. Why is this? There could be several reasons, but a lack of headings (or meaningful headings) within chapters or sections is usually one of the main causes.

Flip a coin and think about what you do when writing the kind of report just described. Honestly, do you give much thought to the quality or quantity of headings below chapter or section level? Like most typical report writers, probably not. Yet, clearly, your readers would benefit from you making more effort with your use of headings.

This article looks at 5 things you can do to make your headings more audience-focused and, therefore, useful.

Step 1: Ignore convention. This is the hardest step because the convention of under-using headings is strong and well-established. Strange when you consider how unhelpful the convention is for most readers.

Of course, if you make the break, your reports will be visibly different and this might take some getting used to. But be brave, in the long run your readers will thank you.

Step 2: Increase the quantity. As a rule of thumb, the more headings you use, the better. Your reports will already have headings at chapter, part and section level. What most writers fail to do is think about headings below these levels - namely topics and paragraphs.

Start thinking about how you can organize your lower level content into topics and how you can identify them with headers that are meaningful to your audience. Also, think about the paragraphs within those topics. Are there any paragraphs with key pieces of information likely to be widely read? If yes, consider giving those paragraphs a meaningful heading, too.

One other small, but important point: assign consistent font sizes and styles for both your topic and paragraph headings. And don't overdo the formatting. Less is always more in these matters.

Step 3: Be more, not less descriptive. One of the least helpful aspects of conventional document headings is brevity. The convention is to use one-word generic headings. For example, words like: timetable, process, change. Generally speaking, your readers will benefit greatly from more descriptive headings because they give a clearer summary of the content before diving into the detail.

Instead of one-word headings think more specifically about the content. For example, use descriptive phrases like: Timetable for introducing product changes, New process for storing sensitive files, Proposed change to customer record fields.

Step 4: Assess context. Having said that, descriptive headings need to be created and applied intelligently. You constantly need to assess the context in which your headings appear. Taking our 'process' example, if you are writing a document with the following Chapter and Section headings:

Chapter: Upcoming Changes to Data Storage Section: Changes to storing sensitive files

then a topic or paragraph heading within that context would only need to be 'Process' or Process description' because it's clear from other headings what the process refers to.

If the same content explaining the process was used in a shorter document without those context-setting higher level headings then the more descriptive heading, 'New process for storing sensitive files' is of great benefit to your reader.

Step 5: Avoid numbering. Another well-established convention is the use of numbers. At higher levels in the document hierarchy this is usually a combination of numbers and text. At lower levels it's often numbering alone.

Unless there is going to be heavy-duty referencing of your document for legal or regulatory purposes, then I would recommend using numbering at chapter and section levels only. Numbered paragraphs do little to enhance the reading experience and used extensively at this level, will likely discourage you from thinking about including any meaningful headings. Typical writer thinking in this situation is, "I've numbered all my paragraphs, so why would I need to add anything more?".

In conclusion, your headings are signposts. They guide your readers to the information they need. Finding that information will always be easier when the signposts are clear and frequent.

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