A Quick Guide to Pyramid-Style Writing
The secret of my success (assuming that I've had both secrets and success) is that I learned to write like a journalist at a relatively early age. This approach is called the ' pyramid ' (or often the 'inverted pyramid'). It allows me to write first-draft content with a minimum of effort to meet any length or time limitation I may be facing. The method is this: put the most important stuff at the top of the article. It begins with the first paragraph, often called the 'lede'. We want to keep this paragraph short (in journalism the limit is 23 words) and to tell the entire story with that paragraph. The next two paragraphs contain the most important supporting details: why the story is important, how we know it's true, how it work. These are called the 'nut graphs'. Look at my lede and supporting paragraphs? How did I do? The story here is often not the 'thing' itself (in this case, the 'thing' is 'the pyramid style of writi
