In this post, I want to address the issue of headings in
doctoral capstone studies. Drawing from my experience in editing students’ capstone
documents for form and style, I’d like to offer some notes about the nature and
purpose of headings and subheadings in studies. Then, I’d like to share some
information and resources for correctly formatting these headings in APA.
Headings are a key way that writers help readers make sense
of and navigate documents, especially long ones such as capstone studies. By
looking at the text of a heading and its formatting, readers can more easily understand
your study’s focus and follow your narrative.
In APA, five heading levels are possible. In a Walden
doctoral capstone study, an additional heading level, Level 0, is used for
main-level headings such as chapter and section titles. Most Walden capstone
writers will use Level 0-3 (and possibly Level 4) headings in their documents. The
different heading levels’ formatting varies in terms of whether they are
centered or indented, bold or in plain text, in upper/lowercase or sentence
case, or followed by a period. The Form and Style Checklist includes a helpful overview
of the different APA levels used in Walden capstone documents.
The important thing to remember is that headings in APA are
hierarchically structured in terms of their APA level. That is, a Level 1
heading is a subheading of a Level 0 heading whereas a Level 2 heading is a subheading
of a Level 1 heading. The concept of nesting may be another way to think about
this. By looking at the formatting of a heading, especially in relation to
other surrounding headings, a reader should be able to glean important details
about how content is related to other content (and, more broadly, how the
document is structured).
Most headings in your capstone study are specified in your
program template and/or checklist. When drafting the different sections of your
study, you will want to make sure that the phrasing, ordering, and APA level of
your headings match what is in these documents.
In some sections, especially long ones like the literature
review, you may want to add additional subheadings (most probably, Level 3 and
4 ones) to help readers better follow the different strands of your narrative. When
doing so, I recommend making your headings succinct yet sufficiently
descriptive enough that a reader glancing only at the heading would have a good
idea of the content that followed it. Definitely, heed the guidance of your
committee members.
When using your program template, you can apply a pre-formatted
style tag to each of your headings. The Styles section of the Home tab in
Microsoft Word includes correctly-formatted tags for each of the APA heading
levels. By tagging your headings rather than manually formatting them, you can
more easily ensure that they are correctly formatted. Another advantage of
using the style tags is that the Table of Contents can be automatically updated
to include current Level 0-2 headings and corresponding page numbers. For an
overview of how to work with your program template and apply style tags, please click play and watch the Template Demonstration Video embedded below.
Hopefully with this
post, I’ve provided some useful perspective on this aspect of capstone writing.
In the Comments section, we’d love to hear your feedback.
Tara Kachgal is a dissertation editor in the Walden University Writing Center. She has a Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and teaches for the School of Government's online MPA@UNC program. She resides in Chapel Hill and, in her spare time, serves as a mentor for her local running store's training program.
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