Point Up Front

The first sentence in a text should contain the main point of the text, and the rest of the first paragraph should contain enough context to understand it. This makes it much easier for your reader to understand what you're trying to convey because you are asking them for a smaller up-front investment. Trying to ease the reader into your text doesn't improve readability, and it doesn't make it more fun to read. It just adds fluff and causes people to skim your text instead of engaging with it.

Phew! Now that you know what this post is about, we can spend more time on figuring out what I really mean, and why I think it's a good idea. Reading is a time investment for the reader, and when reading things on random blogs, such as this one, the investment is a gamble because the chance of this entire post being junk is pretty high. If the payoff is put up front the reader doesn't have to read the first few paragraphs to assess if they should continue or stop reading: the idea is already out there and they can make an informed decision right away. This is important on the internet as there are more things to read than time available to read them.

Contrast this with the hypothetical inverted version of this post, which I could have opened with:

I have been writing posts on this website for over twelve years, and looking back I can clearly see my writing change over those years. My posts has a pretty large spread in their voice: some are dry sounding, and others are more fluid sounding. However, due to the number of blog posts or articles I read (or rather, glance over) in a day, I've lately come to appreciate a different structure for the posts I read, and so I've started to think about changing the voice in my own posts too. This is not to say that the main point of me writing is to get more readers -- I mainly write for myself -- but I want to produce writing that I would also like to read.

This is either fluff ("some things are A, some are not A"), background story (how long I've been writing this blog for, that my writing style has changed), or something resembling bragging ("Other people? They write to become popular; I write for myself"). If I open a link to this paragraph, I immediately look at the scrollbar to see how long this guy is about to go on for. This is, unfortunately, how I have been writing for years.

There is another reason why I like to put the point front and center early on, and it's a thing that once I started noticing it I have a really hard time not noticing it. Many people, and I'm sure you know someone who does this, a family member or a coworker, has made this a habit, and while I think it mainly applies to their speaking, it can also leak into their writing, since many people will write in the manner that they talk. I also wonder if it's a new-ish phenomenon or if this is how people have been writing for years. It ends up taking so long, and they keep on adding words in between all of the empty spaces in their sentences, wherever they can find, and there keeps being new minor, and I really mean minute, information that's coming out that's included for some reason, and while all of this is happening the reader, or listener, is on the edge of their seat anticipating what—and if you look back in this entire paragraph, you'll see that I haven't yet said what—the point is.

I do wonder if my advice is a symptom of a shortened attention span instead of actual writing advice. I don't think this is the case, because putting the point first is the norm sometimes, like in academia where papers have an abstract: a paragraph with the main point and enough context for it to make sense. You can take a paper, read the abstract, and basically understand if you should read the rest of the paper. This is crucual for academic papers, because (a) there's a lot of them, and (b) reading one can be a significant time investment.

For instance, this is Ray tracing animated scenes using coherent grid traversal, a random paper I chose from SIGGRAPH 2006:

We present a new approach to interactive ray tracing of moderate-sized animated scenes based on traversing frustum-bounded packets of coherent rays through uniform grids. By incrementally computing the overlap of the frustum with a slice of grid cells, we accelerate grid traversal by more than a factor of 10, and achieve ray tracing performance competitive with the fastest known packet-based kd-tree ray tracers. The ability to efficiently rebuild the grid on every frame enables this performance even for fully dynamic scenes that typically challenge interactive ray tracing systems.

For contrast, here's the first paragraph of a brownies recipe I found on Kagi:

For years, I couldn’t seem to find a recipe for brownies that met my standards. Anytime I made homemade brownies, I wanted them to be just like the ones I ate as a kid – super fudgy, moist, and chocolaty, with crispy edges and crackly tops. But the thing is, these brownies didn’t come from a recipe. We always made them from a box. Nowadays, I prefer to bake from scratch, but no brownie recipe I tried could live up to the chocolate brownies of my childhood.

Abstracts and cooking recipes aren't very alike, so this is not a serious comparison, but it is a useful axis to put writing on: is your first paragraph more like an abstract or a cooking recipe? Where do you want it to be?

I've been judging posts I've read in the past week or so on this metric, and maybe surprisingly, it's been pretty even. A lot of technical blogs are good at being pretty blunt about what they're writing about, which I appreciate. Some posts have a lead, which I guess is pretty similar to the academic abstract. This helps, but it, like the abstract, doesn't flow with the rest of the text. It's nicer when it all flows together. A bunch of posts start with filler, which I skim. I might go back and re-read it if I find anything interesting, but that's rare.

I hadn't planned to write a post about what's basically writing advice; I'm not a writer. Maybe me trying to remove fluff in my writing is due to llm-spam. Maybe I've just gotten tired of reading boring and stale text. Maybe my attention span has shrunk. Maybe I'm looking for new ideas. Maybe I've gotten impatient, or cynical, or frustrated. Maybe I'm worried.

I don't know exactly where that last paragraph came from. But it feels somewhat real, so I'm leaving it in here at the very end of this post. Besides, it's not the point.

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