←back to thread

595 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(15): >>43505573 #>>43505719 #>>43506046 #>>43506189 #>>43506400 #>>43506970 #>>43507372 #>>43507727 #>>43508468 #>>43508865 #>>43508960 #>>43513506 #>>43514694 #>>43515583 #>>43516620 #
pansa2 ◴[] No.43507372[source]
> The inverted pyramid is almost always the correct format for your text.

Do you find this conflicts with "offering an interesting story that resonates with the reader"?

For example: Using inverted pyramid to describe a problem and my solution, I'd structure my writing as "here's a problem, I found this solution, using this method". Whereas a story would usually be told in chronological order: "here's a problem, I tried these methods, and came to this solution".

Or is it possible to both have your cake and eat it? Tell a good story after giving away the ending?

replies(5): >>43508165 #>>43508344 #>>43508777 #>>43509449 #>>43512939 #
1. ketzo ◴[] No.43512939[source]
Particularly with technical writing, I think you can definitely get away with both.

“How I Reduced My Postgres Query Latency By 100x With A Single Index”

Even in the title, I can tell you the punchline (if you wanna make your DB access faster, use an index!)

but an interested reader still wants to figure out how exactly your solution works, and you can tell them some interesting details along the way

“just enforcing unique constraints does help certain data types, but it’s not a big performance boost most of the time”

while finishing on the kicker

“Since my hottest endpoint by far was for individual users querying orders which were still ongoing, I created an index on the user field for the orders table, and included a status filter in the index, which took p90 latency from 10s to <100ms!”