jack busch

Unless you’re working on a typewriter, it makes almost no sense to start writing your article where your audience begins reading. Like other mediums, written texts benefit from being constructed either from an outline or from the inside out. Few good movies are shot in sequence (Wonder Boys is a rare exception) and even fewer news articles spring forth from a headline. That’s because introductions aren’t the meat of the content. They are meant to be distillations, whether they preface with summary or entice with mystery. It’s difficult to craft a digest or teaser when the source material doesn’t yet exist because the structure and the main alluring details aren’t there yet. It’s like trying to describe an invisible ghost.

In my years of editing and writing web copy, I’ve come across plenty of articles that attempt to do this anyway. Most often, this methodology results in what I call “top heavy content.” And like a potted plant, content that carries all its weight up top always feels wobbly and imbalanced. The introduction tends to overpromise while the body underdelivers or worse, meanders, and the readers are left with an unsatisfying mess.

So, here’s what I do to avoid this. Instead of beginning on line one of the first paragraph, I start from the middle. There are three main reasons why I do this:

Beat the Block

Everyone suffers from an occasional case of writer’s block and professional writers are no exception. This is especially true of perfectionists facing the lead of an article. There’s a lot riding on those first few words so they have to be absolutely flawless. In fact, they have to be better than that – they have to be intriguing and promising enough to draw the reader in to the rest of the piece. Because of this daunting (drink!) task, many writers find themselves staring at a blinking cursor, teetering on the precipice next to a void of white space for hours, unable to produce the right words to get this article kicked off in earnest.

The thing is, though, that this time could’ve been spent out fleshing out the meat of the article. That way, instead of finally getting past the first paragraph and then only having a few moments left to bang out the main points of the article, the writer can go back and agonize over the perfect opening lines after the article is already 95 percent written.

Read more at Anthrocopy.com >>>>