A Dissertation Editor's Tips for Headings in the Capstone Document

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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