For the Love of Language, Stop Abusing Subheadings

Why we should resist the TikTokification of the written word

Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash

In my time as an editor, there’s a pattern that I’ve watched crop up more and more as the years have gone by. Put simply, it’s the unnecessary inclusion of subheadings. Many editors actually advise incorporating these partitions into our writing.

The instruction isn’t totally senseless. There are pieces where these additions can be helpful. Occasionally I see a real use in this mechanism for separating disparate ideas. Sometimes, the concepts in a story feel so discordant that it’s hard to erect an elegant bridge between them.

Subheadings aren’t devoid of utility. Some editors encourage them not because they think readers are dumb, but because they want to maximize accessibility. They offer clear entry points, SEO friendliness, and structure for distracted readers. Especially in certain nonfiction, subheadings don’t serve as fluff, but as integral signposts. Long explainers, guides, technical essays, and dense political texts are often served well by subdivisions.

When I’ve written instructional pieces, the concepts explored have sometimes been too varied to cohere without a few subheadings. But more often than not, the accessibility and SEO benefits that people chase come at the expense of polish and presentation. Subheadings replace the subtle poignancy of a well-paced story with a hand-holding directness.

I’d argue that, in most cases, if we feel two principles or occurrences are related enough to be housed within the same op-ed, story, article, or memoir, we ought to be able to figure out on our own how they connect. And we need to be able to walk readers along that bridge without losing them or overtly instructing them what to feel and when.

When people tell the tales about their travels, very frequently they’ll incorporate subheading breaks every few paragraphs. Not only does it disrupt the flow of the reading, but it often injects a forced whimsicality into more serious memoirs.

For example, in a story about a person and their friends trekking up a mountain and finding catharsis, they’ll separate their narrative into segments labeled, “base camp shenanigans,” “the long journey up the mountain,” “a storm approaches,” and “the clouds open up.” And in each case, it not only detracts from the momentum that writers have built, but gives readers an unsolicited preview of what’s coming next rather than simply allowing events to develop naturally.

Often when I see these subheadings over-employed in opinion or memoir-oriented writing, it appears to stem from a certain laziness or deficit in communication skills. Authors either don’t know why one thought leads to the next, don’t know how to create a coherent segue between them, or they simply don’t trust the reader to understand what they’ve written. Sometimes they’ve just been advised to approach their work this way.

I’d argue that the best solution in almost any piece of prose is to make the leaps between different ideas feel so cohesive that it negates the need for interludes completely. Texts should be fluid enough that no one gets lost in our words merely because they don’t have an index or map.

When constructing new articles, I don’t always know how to correctly order my thoughts. But the routine is as invigorating as it is vital. I’ve come to believe working through that sequence, learning how to put ideas into their proper paragraphs, and getting the final piece to seamlessly congeal is an important exercise in critical thinking. It helps me to grow as a writer and find logical connections that aren’t always apparent to me as I begin my work.

Part of the reason I think that this subheading trend has taken hold is the TikTokification of media. People have grown so attuned to shorts and reels that they believe writing should be treated in the same way, rather than as one of the last bastions of creativity where such skips and abbreviations are superfluous.

In a 200+ page novel, there’s real value in segmenting a story into chapters. Especially in narratives that shift between multiple characters, these junctures give essential room to pause and digest. Without them, the leaps in the narrative can feel jarring. But for texts of two thousand words or less, these chapter-style breaks are rarely necessary for comprehension. At times they can be downright infantilizing. They appear steeped in the assumption that readers don’t have the attention span to finish a few paragraphs without losing their train of thought — without being able to follow ours.

In kowtowing to the attention economy in this way, we effectively train our audiences to consider stories not as stories, op-eds not as op-eds, memoirs not as memoirs, but as YouTube videos divided into multi-part reels — carefully clipped to eliminate breathing room. They’re stripped of much of the context needed to surmise how one thought links to the next — how relationships evolve, how ideas extend from other ideas, and how one location or event leads into the next. At worst, these subheadings steal from readers the opportunity to find meaning on their own. Instead, they’re carefully fed the lessons that are best left implicit. “This is the part of the story where you’re supposed to feel this.”

The overuse of this device isn’t just a trivial gripe. It’s one of the single biggest banes I’ve encountered in all of my time as an editor. In depending too heavily on this approach, writers not only train their readers to shorten their attention spans and expect frivolous stops every few paragraphs, but curtail their own ability to process how stories should naturally develop.

Just as an over-reliance on Google Maps has caused our sense of direction to atrophy, when we scatter these pauses throughout our compositions, instead of letting theories unfurl and events unfold, we vault over the logical steps it requires to understand how our minds process information— the reasoning skills it demands to bridge together thoughts and occurrences that may not seem interconnected at face value. Why certain conversations lead to certain events. How the turmoil in the Middle East or Australia or ancient Rome relates to the turmoil we face in our home countries today. How a unified thread of ideas leads to a cut and defined conclusion. What deductions we draw from specific events.

When we skip around and frame our stories as neat “openings,” “bodies,” and “takeaways,” we dilute or walk around the milieu that makes memoirs feel most alive. We cut out the meat in favor of the bone and see the forest without its trees. When we jump between chapters and periods of time, we cloud our sense of continuity and the appreciation of precisely how the past relates to the present.

Subheadings aren’t a shortcut to clarity. Too often they’re used as a crutch. A well-told story, a tightly argued essay, or a carefully drawn memoir don’t need road signs to guide a reader along. The logic and the language should do that heavy-lifting. If we trust ourselves as writers, and we trust our readers to follow where the ideas naturally lead, we can retain that critical sense of momentum and surprise. We can preserve the art of prose that flows without the constant need for interruption and the ability to truly immerse ourselves in a story or grapple with an idea.