Determining how to break your document into sections can be a very tough task. On the one hand, you don’t want to create too many small sections. At the same time, you don’t want to have one big run-on section. This brings us to the pivotal question: Where do you draw the line?

The following is a list of three ways that you can tell if you have too many or too few sections:

• You have a Section 1.2.3.4.5.6 - We’ve all seen documents with way too many sections in it. This makes the document very hard to read as you have to keep skipping around all the time to gather all of the information you need. In general, I never go past the fourth level when breaking down my documents (ex. Section 1.1.2.3), and I don’t even use the fourth level very often. As a rule of thumb, you will usually end up having more sections in longer documents than in shorter ones.

• You have one Section - This is the opposite of the first point. Instead of having too many sections, you have too few. Unless your document is only a few pages long, you most likely will need to break it down into more than one big section. Just like with a run-on sentence, a run-on section will quickly lose the reader in a sea of information. This doesn’t mean you have to go hog-wild (as demonstrated in the first point), but for a medium sized document you probably want to go to the second level (ex. Section 1.1).

• You get lost reading it - Huge point here. After you are finished with what you think is a solid draft of your document, you should read it the entire way through (better yet, have someone unfamiliar with the document do it). This way, you can make sure that it is both informative and easy to read. If you are having trouble reading it, think of the problems the audience will have. If you find yourself in this situation, take another look at how you’ve broken down the information in your document. You may be able to fix it by simply restructuring the number/content of some of the sections.

It’s not always easy to get a good section layout for a document. However, as long as you put some time into planning the layout, you’ll end up with a quality product.