Nowadays, law students are engaged in different kinds of activities to polish their skills in legal field. Apart from various kinds of internships, moots, debates and research papers, Law students are also writing law articles enthusiastically on different kinds of topics. In last ten years, many websites started to publish law articles from law students. The purpose was to give a platform to law students who were not able to express themselves on prestigious platforms which were limited to just professors, lawyers.
The habit of writing is also important for law students to give them a career where they don’t commit any mistakes in drafting of petition and contracts. And further, article writing also give a big exposure to law students and law firms, lawyers hire law students as their interns after considering the articles written by that law student.
So, due to all these reasons, when a law student tries to write articles in his/her first year, s/he faces many confusions on the structure of his/her article. One of the confusion is to write or not headings in an article. When a law student wants to write that article where s/he need to express his/her thought, s/he choose to not write heading due to the flow of thoughts. This is indeed legitimate argument. But there are also other reasons which require a law student to write heading in article.
Is it necessary to write headings in articles?
Writing in flow like columnists write, is a good way, but you have to decide to whom you are writing for, who is your audience? What is your topic for the article? Are you writing for academic purposes or just expressing your views on any matter?
So, consider the above questions firstly, let’s take every question one by one.
1. Who is your audience?
Audience means those persons who will search your topic and will come to read it. So if you are writing for students or academician who wants to read your article for academic purpose, then you should write your article by dividing that in headings.
For example- if you are writing on the election commission, and people want to know about what are the functions of the election commission, and your article is without heading then they will not do labour to read your article just to know about the functions of elections, they will just skip your article and will open next article where everything is written specifically.
And in another case also, if anyone is writing a research project and wants to know under which statute this election commission established then they will also not read such an article thoroughly to just know the statute of the constitution under which election commission has established.
2. What is your topic for the article?
This is important, this decides whether you should write your article inflow or not, when you write an article to discuss on an academic topic and writing an informative and exhaustive article on that topic then you should write your topic heading-wise.
For example- election commission where you have to discuss, its establishment, functions etc.; any other topic where you will write existing law on it such as cruelty, adultery, adoption, pre-emption, mesne- profits, summons, warrants etc.
But If your article is on such topic which is current, controversial, burning, viral, then you should write in flow, in this case, you will express your opinion on it and opinion will be good if it will be in flow.
For example- current farmer protest, skin-to- skin judgement, same-sex marriage, marital rap or any other topic like that.
3. Are you writing for academic purpose or just expressing your views on it?
In above-mentioned topics also, you have to decide what is your purpose. If you are writing on farmer protest and write on farm laws then it will be for academic purpose, but if you write on ongoing protest and its legality, in such case, you can just express your opinion and write on flow.
The purpose to write headings, is to increase readability of the article. Writing headings in the article helps the mind of reader to segregate the different parts of article and it does not look like a pile of words that just came out from the store of your mind.
So, you have to decide if you are writing an article with great effort then you should also ensure that people read it without jumping on next tab.