On the “meandering intro” - I find the inverted pyramid helpful. Assume that many people won’t get past the first paragraph, so try to deliver the core message there.
“Overreliance on links” makes me sad. I love linking to things. I have a suspicion that nobody on the internet clicks links any more, if they ever did.
“Drop the formality. Write the way you speak in real life.” - 100% agree. You have a voice, use it! This is also where LLM writing really hurts you, it eliminates that voice, and people can tell.
Yeah the inverted pyramid is pretty much the template for all my technical blog posts. Very rarely goes wrong.
“Overreliance on links” makes me sad. I love linking to things. I have a suspicion that nobody on the internet clicks links any more, if they ever did.
I generally find websites in general tend to not link nearly enough. There’s a crap ton of websites with nearly no outbound links what so ever, I think in some misguided attempt to keep the visitor from leaving.
Though link-rot is a legitimate concern and a pretty big problem, but I don’t think not linking is the answer.
“Drop the formality. Write the way you speak in real life.” - 100% agree. You have a voice, use it!
I don’t speak the same way to everyone in every situation, that would be weird. Formal language doesn’t have to lack a voice, though it demands familiarity with that writing style to shine through.
I think in some misguided attempt to keep the visitor from leaving.
I think it’s a lot more innocent than that: old SEO trauma from search engines treating lots of outbound links as link farms, and collating and inserting links is additional effort, it would be habitual for the most academic minded but not necessarily for more casual writers.
That’s one reason, but the other is often sites that don’t want you to leave. Like when no news site will actually link out to the paper from “scientists at foo university” - you’re not supposed to be more interested in that than in going to the next article.
Yeah. The “don’t leave” thing is pretty insidious. I’ve noticed a number of tech blogs will include a link to the primary source—but only grudgingly and they try to bury it as much as possible.
I think “reliance” is the keyword. As @mtlynch & @JulianSildenLanglo commented below, the references shouldn’t be required reading to continue. Otherwise, the reading experience feels like a async runtime, switching tasks at every “await” (hyperlink)!
I call the meandering intro “throat clearing”. It’s common because most people don’t write enough and it’s a warm-up for getting into the rest of the text; it’s their familiar territory that’s easy to write about.
A good rule of thumb is that you can usually delete the first three paragraphs of most technical blogs and then sub in a new lede that tells the reader what’s coming after the rest of the blog post has been written.
It’s better to have a link that few people click than to not have it, IMO. Of course, these days, links are tech debt - after a blog post has been up a few years, link rot sets in and half the links will be 404.
On the “meandering intro” - I find the inverted pyramid helpful. Assume that many people won’t get past the first paragraph, so try to deliver the core message there.
“Overreliance on links” makes me sad. I love linking to things. I have a suspicion that nobody on the internet clicks links any more, if they ever did.
“Drop the formality. Write the way you speak in real life.” - 100% agree. You have a voice, use it! This is also where LLM writing really hurts you, it eliminates that voice, and people can tell.
score 3 · canonical
Yeah the inverted pyramid is pretty much the template for all my technical blog posts. Very rarely goes wrong.
I generally find websites in general tend to not link nearly enough. There’s a crap ton of websites with nearly no outbound links what so ever, I think in some misguided attempt to keep the visitor from leaving.
Though link-rot is a legitimate concern and a pretty big problem, but I don’t think not linking is the answer.
I don’t speak the same way to everyone in every situation, that would be weird. Formal language doesn’t have to lack a voice, though it demands familiarity with that writing style to shine through.
score 1 · canonical
I think it’s a lot more innocent than that: old SEO trauma from search engines treating lots of outbound links as link farms, and collating and inserting links is additional effort, it would be habitual for the most academic minded but not necessarily for more casual writers.
score 1 · canonical
That’s one reason, but the other is often sites that don’t want you to leave. Like when no news site will actually link out to the paper from “scientists at foo university” - you’re not supposed to be more interested in that than in going to the next article.
score 1 · canonical
Yeah. The “don’t leave” thing is pretty insidious. I’ve noticed a number of tech blogs will include a link to the primary source—but only grudgingly and they try to bury it as much as possible.
score 1 · canonical
I click links. I love them. Maybe a bit too much though, since I tend to fall into recursive reading.
score 1 · canonical
I think “reliance” is the keyword. As @mtlynch & @JulianSildenLanglo commented below, the references shouldn’t be required reading to continue. Otherwise, the reading experience feels like a async runtime, switching tasks at every “await” (hyperlink)!
score 1 · canonical
I call the meandering intro “throat clearing”. It’s common because most people don’t write enough and it’s a warm-up for getting into the rest of the text; it’s their familiar territory that’s easy to write about.
A good rule of thumb is that you can usually delete the first three paragraphs of most technical blogs and then sub in a new lede that tells the reader what’s coming after the rest of the blog post has been written.
It’s better to have a link that few people click than to not have it, IMO. Of course, these days, links are tech debt - after a blog post has been up a few years, link rot sets in and half the links will be 404.
score 1 · canonical