Best Practice Guidelines for Health Authors

Elsevier’s Best Practice Authoring Guidelines encompass three parts:

• Including an outline of your chapter to show heading levels
• Clustering content under each main heading with its subordinate headings
• Chunking of content into manageable segments

Outlining your chapter allows you to examine the order in which material is presented and how it is grouped, and may reveal unnecessary duplicate headings. Outlines include all heading levels: main, secondary, tertiary, and so forth (H1, H2, H3, etc.; see sample). Outlining reveals how subordinate headings relate to each other and to the main or primary heading.

Grouping or “clustering” of content refers to the organization of content into a first-level heading (H1) and then subsequent subordinate headings. Learning science has shown that clustering topics makes them easier for students to absorb and retain. A series of primary headings without subordinate headings is not as helpful to students as grouping subordinate headings underneath each primary heading.

Chunking of content is subdividing it into manageable ideas. Chunking occurs naturally in tables, figures, and boxes. Chunking can be enhanced with the use of subordinate headings to divide content, and the use of bullet points. Chunking content is one technique to avoid cognitive overload when presenting information to students. 

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