You’ve probably heard from the legions of people out there telling you how to write blogs that subheadings are a great way to improve readability and make your blog better.

This is a gigantic steaming pantload.  Here are three reasons why.

1. Subheadings add unnecessary words to a blog count. Look, I can see it if you’re regularly posting in the upper hundred / thousands of words count, but for your basic hundred-plus word count blog, adding subheadings is like adding a spoiler on the trunk of your Ford Focus.  It’s not going to do a whole lot of good and it’ll just look dumb.

2. Subheadings can easily be seen as patronizing and insulting to the reader. Again, in very certain circumstances this isn’t true, but if you’re going for any blog tier much higher than basic education (this can also work well in entertainment if all your subheadings feature jokes), you’re going to be preaching to a crowd of experts.  They don’t need your subheadings to tell them what they’re about to read.  They’ll either grok your point within a few words and go on from there or they’ll read the whole thing to see what they can glean from it.

The Continuation of  The Reason List, Or, See What a Bad Idea This Is?

3. Subheadings break up the flow of a blog.  When you break up a post to announce stuff like I just did above, you’ve just done something horrendous to the way the entire post was moving.  I know phrases like “organic flow” make me seem less like a writing guru and more like a crunchy-granola eco-trippy type, but let’s face it.  Every blog moves along at a certain pace. Now, obviously, you would never put a subheading in the middle of a paragraph, and with careful placing, it can help.  But in many cases, all it serves to do is shatter flow.

Subheadings may have a place, in a certain limited fashion, but chances are, unless you’re in a very specific set of circumstances, the best thing you can do is just blog.