Re: How many levels of indents and heads are reasonable?

["heidi arnold" <heidi -dot- w -dot- arnold -at- gmail -dot- com>]

this may be a non-sequitur, but fwiw, my work meets all the standards
for which it is designed.  at least as i have interpreted and applied
these things according to my work.  however i do not feel required to
prove such things in an ad-hoc public forum.  for one reason, the
audience is not receptive, and there is no true forum for dialogue
about the more difficult areas.

heidi

On 10/10/07, neilson -at- windstream -dot- net <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net> wrote:
> I agree, only more so. I think that a limit of three levels is better.
> When you hit that fourth level, YOU may be able to keep in mind where
> you are, but your reader cannot. The material needs to be restructured.
> Perhaps a whole new chapter or eight are needed.
>
> The only exception is when the documentation is "shelfware". If you can
> be nearly completely sure that no one is ever going to read the stuff,
> and its sole purpose is to fulfill a pointy-haired requirement, then
> all you need do is have it appear to meet standards.
>
> Darren Butler writes:
>
> > Krista Van Laan wondering about:  Current thinking on heading levels.
> > Can it all be done with 4 levels, or do we need 6 or more?
> >
> > The general rule for most military documents is a primary heading with
> > no more than 4 subordinates. The philosophy is this; if the information
> > is well-organized, you shouldn't need a 5th level. This forces the
> > author to either combine similar sub-chunks of data into a higher
> > heading or create an additional category/heading that would hold all of
> > the sub-chunk headings. This especially applies to procedural
> > information and other instances where a flow of thought is critical.
>
>
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