Maybe I'm reading too much on the Web, and it's spoiling me for regular print on paper.
I pick up a newspaper with long feature articles (the kind papers don't run enough of these days), and I skip to the bite-size items. If magazine article text isn't full of subheads and pull quotes, I skip that too.
It's not that the Web has reduced my attention span to that of a gerbil. I'm just less tolerant of text without navigation guides. If done right, even a hypertext document spread over several pages offers a synoptic overview. At a glance you can see where you are, where you can go, and what you'll find when you get there. In most newspaper and magazine articles, the headline and blurb are about all the guidance you get. (In the good old days, every chapter of a novel started with a summary of the key events to follow. Now you're lucky to get chapter breaks at all.)
Bad as it is in print media, lack of navigation guides in webtext is even worse. Too often, we land on a site only to find a page crammed from margin to margin with solid text, and not so much as a blank line between paragraphs. Even printing such text wouldn't help much.
Whether we're writing long scrolling "archival" text, or screen-size chunks, we serve our readers poorly if we don't give them some way to grasp the whole document while making it easy to find and understand particular sections.
How Subheads Can Improve Shovelware
Archival Webtext is less elegantly known as "shovelware"-print text dumped onto the Website without even a pretense of adaptation. You'd probably be better off converting it to a PDF file and letting readers print it off. But if you insist on presenting it as HTML, and making readers scroll through it, subheads can help enormously.
First, you can offer your subheads at the top of the document as a table of contents, with each subhead a link to a particular section. If all I want to read is your conclusion, I'm there at once.
If you think your document is too linear for that, subheads can still help by breaking up long stretches of text. Since Web readers tend to scan rather than plod from line to line, each subhead is a kind of landmark. It tells us the present section won't go on forever, and the next section (as its subhead scrolls up) will offer something interesting as well.
Subheads in Chunks Too?
Even if you've broken your document into stand-alone chunks of 100 words or so (enough to fill a single screen, with room left over for navigation and links), subheads can help. A solid mass of 100 words, in 8 or 10 lines, does not invite reading. It certainly needs at least a title, breaks into two or more paragraphs, and perhaps a subhead somewhere near the middle of the chunk.
The layout of subheads in Webtext is much like that in print. Subheads tend to be boldface (or in color, or both), with white space above and text close below. In a two-line subhead, the second line should be shorter than the first. If you've broken your text into chunks or clickable pages, any given subhead ought to have at least 5 or 6 lines of body text following it before the end of the chunk or page. If your page is set up in multiple columns, you should avoid the dreaded "tombstone," when subheads in adjacent columns line up.
Pique Readers' Interest With...
Writing good subheads is an art in itself. I suppose you could just write "Part 1," "Part 2," and so on. But you're more likely to keep readers on your site by swiping some gimmicks long known to magazine writers: hooks.
A good hook in the first paragraph of an article will draw readers deeper into the text, and later hooks will keep them reading despite the distractions of nearby ads and illustrations.
Among the standard lead devices that you can adapt to subheads:
•The question--Because we keep reading to learn the answer.
•The unusual statement--Because we read on to find out just how weird you really are.
•The quotation--"Because we love to read what people have actually said," said Crawford.
•The direct address--Because you're on this site to learn or do something that interests and benefits you.
•The allusion--Because if readers catch the reference (whether to Jim Morrison, T.S. Eliot, or Esther Dyson), they feel they share something with you.
•The rebuttal--Because disagreement means a fight, and we all love a good punch-up.
Sell With Subheads!
Subheads are especially helpful in sales pitches. They can gain attention (Free!), spark interest (How to retire in 2 years!), establish credibility (What Greenspan says about us), and incite action (Click here for your instant subscription).
Obviously you don't want so many subheads that your text looks like a set of flashcards. If your text is organized categorically (Six Ways to Save on Taxes), and each category is pretty short, you might want to switch to a bulleted list instead. In a narrative or argument, you might not want to give away some surprise or clinching point, but still need to break up that long column. A pull quote or two can work well in this case. Or you can simply break up text with an inset graphic.
Whether you're writing in chunks or scrolling text, ask yourself if the subheads provide both an overview of the document and reasons to read it. A subhead that doesn't provide both doesn't deserve to live--any more than body text deserves to live if it doesn't add something solid and useful to the document.
Great insight. You have brought something to my attention. Kind of a oh, yea he's right...thanks
/ip
http://www.breathesmoke.com
Posted by: Ian Philpot | October 27, 2004 at 12:42 PM