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595 points rbanffy | 3 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. jvanderbot ◴[] No.43515935[source]
Ok, but isn't pyramid the point at the top, and inverted pyramid is the point is at the bottom? Have I been looking at the wrong pyramids my whole life?
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2. ithkuil ◴[] No.43519046[source]
No you looked at pyramids the right way.

The disconnect here is what is the meaning of the "width" of the triangle/pyramid in the analogy.

The idea in the journalistic inverted pyramid concept is that the width of the pyramid correlates to the importance of the information.

So you start first with the most important information (the base of the pyramid, at the top) and then as you continue you fill in the details that may be interesting and necessary to support the important information, but not necessarily important on their own (the tip of the pyramid, at the bottom)

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3. jvanderbot ◴[] No.43519725[source]
So it's precisely the opposite. Wonderful. I suppose I shouldn't expect anything different, after a few decades of seeing these opposite interpretations arise in parallel.