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595 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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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hk1337 ◴[] No.43508865[source]
> 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.

This sounds similar to what I was taught, in high school ~30 years ago, about journalism. When you write an article for the paper, the first sentence should have the who, what, when, where. The reader should be able to get the basic, relevant information from the first sentence then start giving more details as you go along. This is not only for the reader but to make it easier for the editor if/when they need to cut an article short then they can just cut text from the end.

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1. strogonoff ◴[] No.43515022[source]
The inverted pyramid principle is like a cold shower: it feels harsh at first but is overall good for your fitness as a writer, as it requires you to 1) understand your own main idea and distil it, which is not always easy if you are not writing a factual news story, and 2) not indulge and get to that distillation immediately, allowing the reader to stop whenever they reach the level of detail they want, which may not jive well with a “free” ad-based publication model but is absolutely reasonable in a subscription-based model (which is, I suppose, where the rule originated).

It is among the few useful things I learned at the university.