The findings of Pew Internet’s Social Media and Young Adults report earlier this week makes the case for inverted pyramid and sticky pieces writing by bloggers who wish to establish and retain relevance in a culture that wants more information in smaller doses.
THE REPORT
Pew’s report shows that teens are more interested in the snack-sized bits of information associated with text messaging and status messages in social media networks like Facebook. Despite fitting this description, Twitter is surprisingly unpopular among teens.
Blogs have lost favour likely because of the relatively high word count and the amount of information contained within most blog posts. That means teens are also less likely to start or maintain their own blog.
INVERTED PYRAMID
The inverted pyramid is a style of writing developed by newspapers to ensure readers get the most relevant information first followed by supplemental information of decreasing importance.
For pure news articles, the lead –the first paragraph– is the most important element. It should tell most of the story in the fewest words possible (typically 30-40 words). Front loading the article with the most relevant information means that editors are able to cut out paragraphs from the bottom up, based on available print space, without having to rewrite the piece. Basically, the author should make sure to put the relative fluff last.
STICKY PIECES
Whether they’ve written a longer piece about a complex idea and have broken it up into manageable sections, or they’re connecting a series of smaller ideas into something bigger, many bloggers have been breaking up posts into logical sections with heading titles for quite some time. Rather than overwhelming readers with the sea of words, they write a larger piece that’s broken up into sticky pieces, each of which could be something bigger on their own.
THE EXPERIMENT
Okay… This post is an experiment. I wondered if the reason blogs aren’t as popular anymore is because authors don’t communicate their ideas effectively which artificially drives up audience-scaring word count.
I decided to take an a-la-carte-consumption view to writing this post. I also decided to remove all personality to over-illustrate how being concise ensures delivery of important information that can’t fit the mold of a snack-sized-information-culture.
The question becomes, how much of this post do you remember?
