Suppose that the editor of your favourite journal has specified that section headings must be centred, in small capitals, and subsection headings ragged right in italic, but that you don't want to get involved in the sort of programming described in The LaTeX Companion (see TeX-related books; the programming itself is discussed under `@'). The following hack will probably satisfy your editor. Define yourself new commands
\newcommand{\ssection}[1]{%
\section[#1]{\centering\sc #1}}
\newcommand{\ssubsection}[1]{%
\subsection[#1]{\raggedright\it #1}}
and then use \ssection and \ssubsection in place of
\section and \subsection. This isn't perfect: section numbers
remain in bold, and starred forms need a separate redefinition. Also,
this will not work if you are using
NFSS outside of LaTeX2e,
because the font-changing commands behave differently there.