26 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality headings, with Participants and Questionnaires, for instance, as subsections within the main methodology section of your paper. The latter would be the safer route in most cases, and since very few journals require particular wording for headings beneath first- level headings, there will generally be more flexibility in choosing your second-level and subsequent headings. It will come as a great relief to some authors that many journals do not give such detailed instructions about the format or wording of headings – many, for example, will simply limit authors to using three levels of heading beyond the title. This means that you have the opportunity to devise a creative heading for each section that accurately reflects the content of the section it introduces, and to format the three levels of headings as you wish, but it doesn’t mean that the headings can be laid out or formatted in a careless or inconsistent manner. If, for instance, you simply type all your headings in using the exact same font and format, then your reader (including that all-important editor at the journal) will not be able to distinguish a second-level heading from a first-level or third-level one. So the freedom to format your headings as you like is an opportunity to flaunt your creative formatting skills: use bold font for the first level, italics for the second and regular font for the third, or perhaps larger bold font for the first level, a smaller font in bold for the second and the smaller font in italics for the third. The possibilities are virtually endless, but be sure that the system you design works effectively to distinguish all the sections of your paper, and once you’ve decided on the format and levels you’ll be using, be consistent and stick to your system. Authors are generally so steeped in their own work that it’s difficult to be fully aware of the confusion that can result when headings are used in inconsistent ways. Certainly headings are fancy words and make your paper more visually attractive, but they are also essential PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk