The first half of this reminded me of the first section from Scott’s Nonfiction Writing Advice (which I think about often when doing my own writing).
The core point:
1. Divide things into small chunks
Nobody likes walls of text. By this point most people know that you should have short, sweet paragraphs with line breaks between them. The shorter, the better. If you’re ever debating whether or not to end the paragraph and add a line break, err on the side of “yes”.
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Finishing a paragraph or section gives people a micro-burst of accomplishment and reward. It helps them chunk the basic insight together and remember it for later. You want people to be going – “okay, insight, good, another insight, good, another insight, good” and then eventually you can tie all of the insights together into a high-level insight. Then you can start over, until eventually at the end you tie all of the high-level insights together. It’s nice and structured and easy to work with. If they’re just following a winding stream of thought wherever it’s going, it’ll take a lot more mental work and they’ll get bored and wander off.
Remember that clickbait comes from big media corporations optimizing for easy readability, and that the epitome of clickbait is the listicle. But the insight of the listicle applies even to much more sophisticated intellectual pieces – people are much happier to read a long thing if they can be tricked into thinking it’s a series of small things.
This is an interesting point, but I strongly suspect the motivation is completely different here. Scott’s goal is to allow people to progress from the beginning to the end in digestible chunks, so as to avoid blockers. By contrast, the marketing discretization strategy assumes most of the audience won’t read the whole thing, so they try to make the parts more or less independent so different levels of attention still get some kind of message.
The first half of this reminded me of the first section from Scott’s Nonfiction Writing Advice (which I think about often when doing my own writing).
The core point:
This is an interesting point, but I strongly suspect the motivation is completely different here. Scott’s goal is to allow people to progress from the beginning to the end in digestible chunks, so as to avoid blockers. By contrast, the marketing discretization strategy assumes most of the audience won’t read the whole thing, so they try to make the parts more or less independent so different levels of attention still get some kind of message.