Style is essential to making a strong first impression. Admittedly, this usually applies to fashion rather than formatting. But in the academic realm, you’ll win more points for applying clear and consistent heading styles in a document than for wearing a fancy outfit.
And since a well-formatted document is vital for clarity as well as grabbing the reader’s attention, today we’re taking a look at how to apply heading styles in Microsoft Word.
The ‘Headings’ styles in Microsoft Word are formatting options for making headings and subheadings stand out from the other text in your essay. This will help your reader, particularly in longer essays, by clearly indicating where different sections begin and end.
Microsoft Word actually comes with a number of default heading styles (named ‘Heading 1’ through to ‘Heading 9’). You can use these as you find them, but you may also need to change them to fit with any specific requirements for headings set out in your style guide.
But how should you use these headings? Like so:
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If you want to use numbered headings, Microsoft Word’s multilevel list options are very useful. This will apply numbering to titles and subtitles whenever a ‘Heading’ style is used, thereby ensuring clear and consistent numbering for all headings in your document. To do this, you’ll need to:
This will apply a different numbering level to each heading style, while you can also modify and create multilevel list styles via the ‘Multilevel List’ menu.
This numbering will also update automatically if you add or remove headings, saving you the effort of re-numbering headings manually.
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