Craft5 min read
Writing that actually gets read
Most posts fail in the first two sentences. Here is how to make the opening carry its weight.
By Elena Marsh
Nobody owes you their attention. The opening line is the only part of a post that everyone reads, so it has to do real work: name the problem, name the reader, and promise something specific.
Cut the warm-up. The paragraph you wrote to get yourself going is almost never the paragraph a reader needs. Delete it and start at the second one.
Write short sentences when the idea is hard and longer ones when it is easy. Rhythm is comprehension. If a sentence takes two passes to parse, it is not clever, it is broken.
Finally, end on something the reader can do tomorrow. A post that changes nothing was a diary entry.
