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Writing Trick: Your Subheads Should Tell A Story
The easiest way to make your writing more skimmable is to organize and separate your ideas with subheads.
Subheads are big, bolded sentences or section titles that subtly tell the reader where one idea starts and the next idea ends. Subheads are also what the reader’s eye gravitates to first — because subheads are usually larger font and bold, indicating emphasis.
This is a subhead.
And chances are, you “skimmed” this subhead before you even read anything else here. This the first step to making your writing more skimmable.
But the next step is to have your subheads tell a story.
If you are writing a list, for example, each subhead should be the main point of whatever it is you are “listing.” If you are writing an essay titled, “5 Proven Strategies For Overcoming Procrastination,” then your 5 subheads should be each of the “5 proven strategies.”
Why?
- It makes the piece more organized. And once you list out what the 5 proven strategies are, the piece sort of writes itself. You know what 5 things you want to say — now you just have to color in the lines.
- It makes the most valuable content immediately accessible to the reader. The promise you are making in the headline is: “5…
