Subheadings on Top

The most important digital navigation tool is not actually the back button.

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

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Technology is changing our reading habits. It always has, of course, but rarely has a change happened so quickly and with such far-reaching impacts.

I am, of course, talking about the technology behind subheadings.

To give subheadings their due, they first starting showing up in the 17th century, born out of the driving need of damn near everyone in the European Renaissance to organize and categorize literally everything. Consequently, “outlining” as we know it appeared on scene, and it is in this context that the term “subhead” was first used.

I know your driving need right now is probably the question: whyyyyyyy? Why did people suddenly need outlines and chapters and tables of content and indices and, yes, subheadings?

Simply put, the collective knowledge of humanity was expanding at an exponential rate, and it was impossible for any merely human brain to keep up with it.

Two centuries after Gutenberg invented the modern movable-type printing press, printed books were commonplace items among the upper & educated classes. Philosophy, literature, and science were booming as writings in those fields became easier to share and build on. Information was piling up in heaps of books, and, much as Socrates had feared nearly two millennia earlier, it became impossible to memorize all there was to know.

We take this for granted. Modern readers understand the need for tables of content, indices, chapters, and subheadings because we know we cannot possibly remember everything we’ve ever read. As a result, and in a very organic way, the structure of books developed over centuries to make them both easier to read and easier to reference because of the tacit understanding that people, over the course of their lives, would read far too much to ever remember.

Back When Memory Was King

Prior to the success of the printing press, though, most people were reading things they already knew very well: the Bible, religious treatises, famous classical works, and epic poems. If you could read, chances were good that outside of letters, contracts, and the rare “new” work, you were mostly re-reading things you had read many times before. You might not have memorized everything, but when your whole collection of books numbered less than fifty, you knew exactly where to find the turn of phrase you were looking for. Walls of unbroken text on the page were not a problem, since you already knew the book backwards and forwards, likely long before you could afford to buy your own copy.

What need would such a book owner have for subheadings?

None.

However, by the early 19th century, subheadings had become standard fare in both legal and scientific documents/publications as well as that old standby, newspapers. It was out of necessity, as the burden of data was already overwhelming. Have you ever looked at printed documents from the 1820s? It’s eye watering, because there was so much information packed into very little real estate with the smallest typefaces possible.

It was the start of the industrial revolution and, arguably, the incubation period of the information technology revolution and subheadings helped make things readable and, in the long run, searchable. They were simply convenient.

The Rise of Subheadings

But today, subheadings¹ are required, especially for non-fiction books and articles. You might think that it is due to the fact that modern readers do not have the attention span to read “long form” text anymore, because [insert “curmudgeonly grumbling about the decline of education, lazy readers, etc.” here], but actually, it has more to do with technology.

So the year was 2011. I'm pretty sure about that since it was mid-way through my speed-run master's degree in Library and Information Studies. I was in a class about the history of text technology and the instructor made an offhand comment about how her editors asked her to break up her latest chapter using subheadings.

This was new to her but she was hardly an inexperienced academic, having already spent 20 years in the trenches of academia and getting tenured along the way. She was not a newbie. Her CV was about six pages long, double-sided.

Previously, her editors/publishers wanted manuscripts that were mostly walls of text. The only headings they wanted were for upper-level things like abstract, introduction, and conclusion (or chapters, depending on whether it was a journal article or a book). Subheadings were necessary sometimes, but used sparingly, because one thing that has remained true over the centuries is that paper and ink cost money, so to maintain profit margins it was important to use as little as possible. Egregious use of subheadings meant more space and ink used, thus less profit.

But then, suddenly in 2011, they were asking her to break things up through the liberal use of subheadings, and she had no idea why.

I did.

The ebook revolution was still in its earliest stages in 2010/2011. People were just starting to self publish on Amazon, and I was one of those people. I was trying to get my fiction published by a publisher, mostly because I thought I had to, but I was self publishing my nonfiction memoir, Grieving Futures, which is about the aftermath of the deaths of my parents. A very depressing story overall, and one I had had no luck selling to an agent, despite trying for over ten years. Like so many others, I decided to self publish instead.

However, those were the days before formatting an ebook could be done easily, when software like Vellum and Atticus didn't exist. Some apps were capable of creating ebooks, such as software like Calibre and Jutoh (both still going strong), but they had steep learning curves. Smashwords, an early publishing aggregator, had their own book conversion tool that was ominously called “Meatgrinder” and just as much fun to use.   

Long story short: ebook creation was very cumbersome to do.

So there I was, hand coding my own ebook.

Honestly, that isn't as impressive as it looks, since most ebook formats are built on the same programming languages used to build websites, that is, HTML and CSS. Ebooks are getting fancier these days, but that's essentially what they are: a self-contained website treated as an individual file. There's more to it than that, of course, but I point this out to show that my previous skills as a website developer meant that I was in an excellent place to actually hand code my ebooks, which was easier for me to do than learning obscure software.

Which is all to say that I understood the back end as well as the front end of self publishing an ebook.

When the professor mentioned her editor’s strange request that she start including a lot of subheadings, it was clear that she was confused by it and also a little bit annoyed. She didn't see the point, and thought it was ridiculous to add these flourishes of extraneous subheadings. She immediately blamed it on people's attention spans shrinking to the point that they couldn't read a wall of text anymore, and needed subheadings to break it up for them. I wasn't going to argue that one, then or now, because for all I know it could be true.

But I also knew that there was a more technical reason for it.

It’s all about the ToC

I spoke up and explained to her that headings and subheadings are crucial elements for creating table of contents in an ebook, because the table of contents in an ebook are not created by hand but are automatically generated from the headings and subheadings of the document.

I also explained that doing so made it easier to search through the book for what you were looking for, since flipping it open to a page and then scanning it was actually more difficult in the ebook format than a hard copy format.

She looked at me, surprised for a moment, but then nodded. This was, after all, a class about the history of text technology. That the technology had changed was something that made sense to her.

As a side note, this is also why we don't have indices in books the way we used to. If you've noticed—you probably haven't if you read a lot of fiction, but I read a lot of nonfiction—sometimes there is a short index at the back, but the long, involved indices I grew up relying on are a thing of the past. Why? Because in an ebook, you can just search for a term and go immediately to the page it is on.

(In fact, some textbook publishers have done away with printing indices completely. Instead, they give students access to digital copy of the textbook through the publisher’s online portal in order to look things up. It is much cheaper than spending a lot of time and money hiring someone to create an index and then paying for all the extra ink and paper to print 20 pages of an index that almost no one is going to use.)

The same is true for long-form essays/articles online. Using subheadings throughout not only ease the reading experience, but become built-in navigation tools. In addition, screen readers for the blind rely on headings and subheadings to help blind readers navigate a webpage.

Subheadings have moved from being an unimportant side effect of the development of outlines as organizational tools to a critical navigation component in digital documents.

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1. For simplicity’s sake, subheadings here refer to what we also call “headings,” especially in MS Word and HTML. Subheadings are named as styles, such as “Heading 2” (“H2” in HTML) and “Heading 3” on down the list, but not all headings can be at the head of a document or a section of a document, so they are subheadings by a different name.