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> I'm not convinced that saying
> "look in the section Methods, Applying for a court date, in Montreal"
> is any less effective or efficient than "look in section 3.1.3", but
> I have nothing other than opinion to support that skepticism.
I would suggest that looking up a cross-reference based on the number is far
more efficient than the name, especially in a longer document, because the
numbering is sequential.
You can make a decent guess at where you should open the document based on
the clause number, and instantly see (from the clause numbers on the page
you have opened) in which direction you are out. Therefore getting to the
correct clause is a matter of successive refinement that takes only a few
seconds.
If you don't already know where "Methods, Applying for a court date, in
Montreal" is, you have to look it up in the Table of Contents (which is not
ordered alphabetically) or the index (if the document happens to have one,
and if this item happens to have been indexed in the way you have
described), and then you look up the page number. The process of getting to
the right page based on the page number is pretty much the same as getting
to the right page based on the section number, but you have had to make an
additional lookup to get to the point where you have a page number to find.
If the document is only going to be available electronically, then the
cross-reference can be turned into a hyperlink and so made easier to look
up. This reduces but doesn't eliminate the advantage of numbered sections.
But there are plenty of documents which are still primarily paper-based, and
if readers are often going to need to look up cross-references within the
document rather than reading it sequentially, then I would recommend using
numbered headings.
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