When Your Message Matters: Stop Writing Subheadings for the Skim
- Mar 24
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 28
We Already Know People Are Busy. That's Not the Problem.
They don't read. Not really. They scan, skim, and make a decision in the first few seconds about whether something deserves their full attention. Your carefully written paragraph (the one with the nuanced argument and the perfectly placed caveat) often doesn't even get a first glance.
Every communicator, writer, and marketer knows this.
So we've adjusted. We've made things shorter. We've bolded the key points. We've written punchy intros and added subheadings so people can navigate without committing. We've designed our content for the scanner, not the reader.
And for most content, that's fine. Genuinely fine. A newsletter, a thought leadership piece, a product update — if someone skims it and catches the gist, that's often enough. Job done.
But then there's the other kind of content. The kind where skimming isn't enough. Where the gist won't do. Where someone missing a detail or misunderstanding a step has real consequences.
Your change communication. The new compliance procedure. The critical safety briefing before a major system rollout. The policy update that carries legal weight. The organisational restructure that will reshape someone's working week.
This is the content that needs to be read, not scanned, not half-absorbed over a busy inbox, but actually read, from beginning to end, by people who have ten other things demanding their attention at the same moment.
So how do you get people to read all the way through?
How do you close that gap, when everything about their day is pulling them toward speed?
The McDonald's Principle: You're Not Convincing. You're Nudging.
Have you ever noticed what happens when you're about a hundred metres from a McDonald's?
The signs start appearing everywhere. Bus stops. Train stations. The golden arches on a A billboard on the motorway. You're not being persuaded in a logical, structured way. Nobody is making a rational case for why you should go in. They're just placing small, consistent nudges in your path, and those nudges quietly shift your behaviour before you've consciously decided anything.
And that's the difference between messaging that gets ignored and messaging that gets read.
Most communicators try to convince people to read. They write a strong opening paragraph. They make a clear case for why this matters. They structure the argument logically.
But busy, distracted, over-messaged readers don't respond to rational argument as much as we'd like to think. They respond to nudges. To small, well-placed signals that tell their brain: keep going, this is worth it, you're nearly there.
And the most underused nudge in any piece of writing? The subheading.
You've Been Using Subheadings Wrong
Most writers treat subheadings as a filing system.
They use them to organise content into logical, sequential, neatly labelled sections. Section one covers this. Section two covers that. The subheading's job, in this model, is to tell the reader what they're about to read — a chapter title, essentially, serving the writer's architecture more than the reader's experience.
For high-stakes communication, this is not enough to hold your readers attention.
A subheading that functions as a label gives the reader permission to stop.
It tells them what's in the box before they've even read it. They get to decide if it's urgent enough to open right now. The content goes unread. And your message fails.
Subheadings, when written deliberately, aren't labels. They're psychological breadcrumbs. You want to stop writing subheadings that say "here's what this section covers" and start writing ones that say "here's why this matters to you, and here's why you need to keep reading."
Four Ways to Write Subheadings That Keep People Reading
Small nudges, big impact
Tease the Payoff: Open a Loop, Don't Close It
Curiosity is one of the most reliable drivers of human attention. When we sense that a question is incomplete (we've been given the beginning of something but not the end), our brain pushes us forward to resolve it. This is sometimes called an "open loop," and it's the mechanism behind every cliffhanger, every good subject line, and every article that leaves you reading past the point you planned to stop.
Strong subheadings use this. They give enough to create interest, and withhold enough to create pull.
Let's compare these two versions:
"Section 3: Social Media Guidelines" vs "The one line that's quietly killing your social media engagement"
The first one tells you everything. The second one starts a sentence your brain needs to complete. That incompleteness is what keeps people moving through content they would otherwise have stopped reading.
For critical communications, this matters enormously. A subheading like "What changes on 1 June" is a label. A subheading like "What most people miss about the June transition — and why it matters" is a pull. One signals that a section exists. The other signals that something is at stake.
Set the Emotional Tone Before the Content Lands
A good subheading doesn’t just tell the reader what they’re about to read; it shapes what they’re about to feel.
Emotional priming sets the mood before the first sentence of a section has a disproportionate effect on how the content lands.
Before you write a subheading, ask yourself: what do I want the reader to feel at this moment in the piece?
If you want them to feel curious, write a subheading that poses a question they don't have the answer to yet.
If you want them to feel challenged, write one that pokes gently at an assumption they've been carrying without questioning.
If you want them to feel relieved, write one that signals: this part is going to make something simpler.
If you want them to feel respected, write one that treats them as someone who already understands the stakes — not someone who needs to be convinced from scratch.
This matters especially for high-stakes communications. Rolling out a difficult restructure with a subheading that's blunt and bureaucratic will read as cold, and people will approach the content defensively. A subheading that acknowledges the weight of what's being communicated can shift the emotional register entirely, even before the reader has processed a single fact.
3. Address the Objection Before It Forms
Here's something that almost never gets talked about in communications advice: your reader is having a silent conversation with your content before they decide to engage with it. And that conversation sounds something like this:
"Do I need to read this?" "Is this relevant to me?" "Why should I care about this right now?" "What does this have to do with my role?"
This internal monologue is happening in the background, continuously, as your reader's eye moves down the page. And the moment the answer to any of those questions feels like "probably not," you've lost them.
The subheading is your earliest opportunity to interrupt that conversation. Not by avoiding the objection, but by naming it. A subheading that acknowledges what your reader is silently wondering makes them feel understood.
Contrast these:
"Update to the Reporting Process" — gives the reader no reason to believe this applies to them.
"What this means for your team — and what you'll need to do before Friday" — mirrors the question they're already asking. Specific. Personal. Stakes are clear.
Other examples that do this well:
"Why is this change happening now?" — names the question that sceptical readers are already forming.
"What if your team is mid-project when this goes live?" — pre-empts the "but what about us" objection.
"This section is for managers. If that's not you, skip to page 4." — respects people's time and signals that you've thought about your audience as individuals, not a mass.
Readers don't resist content. They resist content that feels like it wasn't written for them. A subheading that mirrors their internal monologue closes that distance instantly.
4. Test Your Subheadings in Isolation — The Skeleton Test
Here's a technique worth building into your process before anything goes out: remove everything from the page except the subheadings. No body copy. No bullet points. Just the subheadings, in sequence.
Read them in order. Ask yourself: if this were all someone read, if these were the only bones remaining, would the message still be understood?
This is the skeleton test, and it's one of the most revealing things you can do to a piece of communication. If your subheadings read as a coherent, logical progression that tells the story on its own, you've built something with real structural integrity. If they read as a series of disconnected labels "Background," "Key Changes," "Next Steps" then you've built a filing system, not a narrative.
The skeleton test also tells you something important about your forward pull. Read each subheading and ask: after reading this, would a busy person feel compelled to read what follows, or would they feel like they could stop here and move on?
If every subheading feels like a natural stopping point, you haven't created momentum. You've created a series of exits.
The Bigger Stakes: When Skimming Has Consequences
Most of the time, a reader who skims your content hasn't cost you much. They caught the gist. They might come back later. Or they might not, and that's fine — not every piece of communication needs to be read in full.
But some of it does. And the problem is that readers don't adjust their reading behaviour based on how much you need them to. They skim your compliance update with the same efficiency they skim a newsletter. They scan your critical pre-launch briefing the same way they scan a company blog post. The stakes, from where they're sitting, aren't visible until they're already past the point where they needed to stop.
This is the real challenge of high-stakes internal communication. You can't rely on the reader to know that this one is different. You have to design it to feel different — to signal, from the very first subheading, that something is at stake here and that reading carefully is worth their time.
That's not manipulation. Its design. It's the same principle behind the McDonald's signs on the motorway: small, deliberate nudges that guide behaviour without demanding it.
And for audiences whose attention is already fragmented, those nudges aren't a nice touch. They're a necessity.
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Messaging designed to survive the rooms you’re not in
🎯 Hi, I'm Vivien,
I help global B2B communication leaders and teams design messaging that survives across stakeholders, buyers, and employees—so critical decisions move faster, updates don’t get ignored, and your credibility stays intact.
While everyone else is still talking about ICPs, Frequency, Channels, and Engagement metrics...
I pinpoint where your messaging gets distorted and uncover the human filters shaping it.
Then I rebuild it so it stays intact as it moves through the people and decisions that matter most.
