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If you could say just one sentence
to your target audience what
would it be?
This should be your first sentence.
After reading the first
ten percent of the article the reader should have learnt
ten about the whole subject, not
everything about ten percent of the subject.
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You should write your Web pages so that the first sentence forms a
brief summary of the entire article. The rest of the paragraph fleshes
it out a bit and the other paragraphs give progressively more
details.
Readers should be able to stop reading the article
at the point where they feel they have reached the level of detail
they need. That may just be the first sentence or even just the
title!
This sells the page to prospective readers - after
reading the first sentence they can decide whether to read the rest of
the article.
This style, known as the inverted pyramid structure, comes naturally to journalists but is quite foreign
to scientific writers who are used to starting from first principles
and finally arriving at their conclusion. This is fine when
the reader is motivated to gain a detailed and precise knowledge of
the subject, but useless for giving people a general overview of what
you are doing, which is what most of the World Wide Web is for.
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Scientific writers are used to starting from first principles and
finally arriving at their conclusion. It is only in this way that one
can give the level of detail necessary for a full and rigourous
understanding of the subject. This is known as the
pyramid style of writing.
Journalists, however, have a different agenda. They are looking to
first give their readers an overview of the situation and then give
them the chance to gain progressively more detail as they read more
and more of the article.
The pyramid structure implicitly assumes that people are
already motivated to read the whole whole work. In
journalism, on the other hand, if you have not caught your readers'
attention in the first sentence you have lost them.
This is why newspaper articles are written so that the first sentence forms a
brief summary of the entire article. The rest of the paragraph fleshes
it out a bit and the other paragraphs give progressively more details.
This is known as the inverted pyramid
style and is the style you should aim for when writing for the World
Wide Web.
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