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Wait: it seems that you are not conveying what the inverted pyramid practically entails. For a reader it means: start at the front, proceed linearly, and stop
by xpe 3y ago
Wait: it seems that you are not conveying what the inverted pyramid practically entails.
For a reader it means: start at the front, proceed linearly, and stop reading at any point because you what follows will be, by construction, “less important”.
For an editor, therefore, cut wherever you want to meet a space limit.
This premise of ordering by solely by “importance” as defined by the author is fundamentally flawed. It stands in conflict with detailed, logically organized, skimmable writing. (I think this could be proved mathematically by assuming some fairly obvious points about human nature, but that is for another time. The sketch would be: how to optimize the linearization of a topic graph using varying reader {preferences and knowledge graphs} as the metric.)
Again, I’m not disagreeing with topic sentences. That idea is independent.
- noelwelsh 3y agoWhat I mean is 1) putting the most important things first and 2) adding sufficient signposts to make the structure of the document clear without having to read everything. I think a strict ordering by importance, which would make a document a kind of simultaneous recursive elaboration of all its points, would be unreadable for a document that, like this one, also has an element of explanation. I think this takes the essence of the inverted pyramid, but if you want to take a definition that is stricter then I'm fine to concede it's not.