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.

There’s no such thing as a right way to write; everyone has their own unique writing style. However, it is important to pay attention to your intended audience and cater to them appropriately. Making the right decision on to maintain a style that reaches out to your demographic ensures that you attract that same user base, and keep bringing them back for more.

By using website data statistics, you can easily track what type of people read your blog. Whether it be 6-14 year old males, or 18-24 year old females, it’s important to consider these as the deciding factors on how to change your perspective on blogging.

Suppose you had an audience that is pretty young. You will want to have a much more casual approach to your blog, avoiding expository writing to some degree. Give the reader something they can laugh about and relate to. If you have an audience that is a specific gender, you will want to have bloggers that are the same gender, and appeal to them accordingly.

One of the biggest mistakes blogs make is when multiple writers don’t have a consensus on what their writing style is. For example, one of the writers will write in a completely narrative mode, while the next will immediately shift to an argumentation style. This causes confusion to the reader, and the flow of the blog is constantly at risk.

There are certain sites in which a very solid news style of writing is necessary, however, blogs in general don’t qualify for that route most of the time. It is up to you as the blogger to make the right decisions on how to modify your writing style for your audience. If you need more tips on how to structure your writing, reading up on High School Journalism never hurt anybody. The fundamentals are what brings success to any blog.

When you sit down to write a post, do you have a clear idea mapped out of what your central theme is going to be? Or do you sit down with a headful of thoughts and try and pick through them as you write? Do you ever write a blog plan?

I have found that writing down a general theme for a blog post, especially if it is a guide type post like this one, really helps to ensure that I stay with just one theme. Otherwise it will take me twice as long to produce the post because I will have to spend a long time editing what I have written to make it more succinct.

Its interesting to see blog posts that start with one theme, pass through another and finish on yet another. With the right writing style this can be made to work, but its a hard thing to pull off well and not lose the reader.

Personally I think keeping it simple is the easiest way to reach your readers, what about you? Complex or simple posts, what works for your readers?