The myth of opening sentence significance

Decent organizational skills and fast internet have served me well.

They say you need a grabber of a lead sentence in order to get people interested in your pieces. I say that is not necessary when a large segment of your audience consists of readers who understand quality should be found throughout a piece.

Who, what, where, when, why and sometimes how served me quite well for a long time. But the inverted pyramid style of news writing, where the most important components of a story reside towards the top and the least significant is at the bottom is (thankfully) no longer required methodology.

The main point of having the least important subject matter at the end of a piece was due to the fact editors needed to chop stories to fit spaces in newspaper layouts. The easiest setup for an established editor was to take a too long story and begin to make it fit better by eliminating sentences and paragraphs at the end of an article.

That would not work very well here.

Many times I try to have a sentence or paragraph at the end of a piece that ties it all or somewhat together so as to make my audience feel they read something worthwhile.

It never made sense to me to employ old newspaper writing style. It may have even been offensive to audiences when I was writing long ago but the Internet and personal computer were not around for the masses back then.

That said, readers must have realized in the back of their heads that with each paragraph they consumed, the article’s content became less significant.

Here there can be no such rule of thumb.

I find if you smatter interesting sentences here and there you can hold your audience better overall.

Space is not really a consideration. Although I like to keep most posts around 500 words, it is not a requirement. It is just a personal belief that in order to increase the likelihood of a return visitor, readers should expect content that respects their time, is informative and entertains in as few words as possible. Five hundred words seem to be the threshold.

In addition to having articles of varying length and leaving ink on your hands, newspapers were in your face 65% advertising and 35% content.

For me, ads go where they go automatically (as opposed to layout artists placing them as they did by hand and now by computer). While newspapers used to be read for hours, the day and age we live in now rarely afford our doing anything for that length of time.

The whole evolution of writing has really been quite amazing.

While there is a dearth of old style journalism, I’m growing to feel this is not entirely such a bad thing. Readers just have to be more discerning when they choose what it is they put their eyes and minds to work with.

If you are selective and consistently support a website or blogger, you help improve the quality of the site and articles available.

And, I am a fortunate storyteller who has benefited from the unique, cooperative relationship that exists between the greater-than-industrial, Internet revolution and the readers who consume its content regardless of format.