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595 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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marginalia_nu ◴[] No.43505551[source]
My general takes (as someone who also has a somewhat popular blog) is that

The inverted pyramid is almost always the correct format for your text. I often put the tweet-length version of the post in the title or first paragraph. Get to the point quickly, then elaborate. Means you can bail out at any point of the text and still take home most of what mattered, while the meticulous crowd can have their nitpicks addressed toward the end.

The problem of finding an audience is best solved by being really transparent about what you're about. Inverted pyramid solves that. There's no point to drawing in people who aren't going to be interested. Retaining existing readers beats capturing new readers.

I'm less bullish on images, unless they are profoundly relevant to the text. Illustrations for the sake of having illustrations are no bueno in my opinion. You want to reduce distractions and visual noise. Images should above all never be funny.

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sunk1st ◴[] No.43505573[source]
Wouldn’t that be a regular pyramid? In what sense is it inverted?
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1. kens ◴[] No.43507903[source]
The "inverted pyramid" first described a visual pyramid, not a conceptual pyramid. I found an 1887 article in Time magazine on journalism, describing the inverted pyramid structure. Specifically, the top of a newspaper article (the display, summarizing the article) consisted of not just the title, but multiple lines of different sizes. First, the title in large capitals. Next, a line of small capitals. Finally, three, four, or more rows of smaller type arranged in the form of an inverted pyramid.

That is, the lines in the heading got progressively shorter, making a visual inverted pyramid, with the most important information first.

Later, the "inverted pyramid" term described the structure of the entire article with the most important parts first, but the metaphor does seem backward.

https://books.google.com/books?id=rNaEw8DwatwC&pg=PA154&dq=%...