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Chapter titles: best practices
Chapter titles: best practices

Tips for writing clear and concise titles for your chapter descriptions.

Jess Ahmet avatar
Written by Jess Ahmet
Updated over 3 years ago

Chapter titles should convey what each chapter in your course is about and why it’s important. You want to hook learners interested in your course and get them to keep going. 

Chapter titles should be short and sweet, so conveying the “what” is most important. But if you could hint at or explicitly state the “why”, that’s even better!

Style guidelines

  1. Use title case.

  2. Don’t use the Oxford comma in chapter titles—use them only in body copy, like chapter descriptions. (The Oxford comma is a comma placed between the last two items in a series, like this: “Workflows, functions, and collections.”)

  3. Include the keywords for each chapter’s topic so learners can get a rough idea of the flow of your course.

  4. Use 50 characters or less.

  5. Your tone should be professional and style should be in line with DataCamp’s style guide.

Examples

Introduction to Portfolio Analysis in R’s chapter titles are great high-level summaries.

  • The Building Blocks

  • Analyzing Performance

  • Performance Drivers

  • Optimizing the Portfolio

Statistical Thinking in Python (Part 1)’s chapter titles are specific and succinct.

  • Graphical Exploratory Data Analysis

  • Quantitative Exploratory Data Analysis

  • Thinking Probabilistically—Discrete Variables

  • Thinking Probabilistically—Continuous Variables

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