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.
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