Showing the Way for Your Reader With Good Headings

Your introduction prepares the reader for the main message and states the main message.  Throughout the report, headings guide the reader by letting them know where they are, how far they’ve come, and where they are going next. The primary purpose of headings is to provide visual cues to the structure of your report. By formatting your headings properly and consistently, you should be able to show your reader

• What topics or groupings you have used to organize your report
• How these topics are related to each other within the hierarchy of the pyramid outline

The following figure shows how a typical arrangement of information in the pyramid outline can translate to headings in a report.

Headings based on the pyramid outline

Your headings come from your pyramid outline.  Level 1 headings come from the questions or answers at the first level of your pyramid.  Level 2 headings come from the questions or answers at the second level of your pyramid.

Effective headings will alert your readers to the content that follows. Readers should be able to skim the headings of your report—either in the report itself or by reviewing the table of contents—to get a sense of its structure.

This diagram is based on Barbara Minto’s example in The Pyramid Principle, page 76.