My summary: don’t assume a reader wants to read your whole piece just because they’ve started it. Tell them at the start what you’re promising to deliver. This increases the number that do read it and are glad they did, and decreases the number that wish they hadn’t and now resent and downvote the piece.
I personally feel this is best done for LW in two stages, with a very brief summary followed by a brief summary that gives the core logic, and then the full in-depth piece that addresses all of the caveats and gives more background. I think creating those two levels of summary also improve the clarity of the thinking and make the reading easier. Many of the best writers on LW seem to follow this format in one way or another.
This is particularly important when neither your name or your publication platform is adequate for the reader to know whether they want to spend their time on your piece, as is the case for me and most LW writers.
Very nice!
This doesn’t touch on one of the mistakes I see most often from newer LW writers:
https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1668446030814146563
My summary: don’t assume a reader wants to read your whole piece just because they’ve started it. Tell them at the start what you’re promising to deliver. This increases the number that do read it and are glad they did, and decreases the number that wish they hadn’t and now resent and downvote the piece.
I personally feel this is best done for LW in two stages, with a very brief summary followed by a brief summary that gives the core logic, and then the full in-depth piece that addresses all of the caveats and gives more background. I think creating those two levels of summary also improve the clarity of the thinking and make the reading easier. Many of the best writers on LW seem to follow this format in one way or another.
This is particularly important when neither your name or your publication platform is adequate for the reader to know whether they want to spend their time on your piece, as is the case for me and most LW writers.