From the course: Writing in Plain English
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Use meaningful headings in your writing
From the course: Writing in Plain English
Use meaningful headings in your writing
- [Instructor] If you're using a lot of headings and subheadings, like we talked about in the previous video, you already have a good start on breaking up your text to make a good readable document, because having a lot of line breaks helps. Plain language studies show that long blocks of unbroken text are daunting to readers, and short paragraphs make text more digestible. If you're wondering how short is short, this isn't an absolute rule. But in general, try to keep most paragraphs to three lines or fewer. You may occasionally need a longer paragraph, but you may have some paragraphs that are just one line or one sentence too. That's fine. You just want each paragraph to have a strong topic sentence and to cover a single idea. Let's apply this to instructions on how to buy a good olive oil for cooking. One long paragraph would overwhelm readers. Instead, break the concepts into shorter focused sections. Your "tasting olive oil before you buy" section will have multiple subheadings,…
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