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Be direct
"Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop." Web readers would be eternally grateful if web writers always followed that piece of advice (delivered by the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland).

But all too often, as any frustrated web reader knows, writers do nothing of the kind. Instead of beginning an article about growing tomatoes with a clear statement telling you what you can expect to read (such as: "The best way to grow tomatoes is ... ") they will either begin with an anecdote ("It was a hot summer day when I first visited the sun-drenched fields of Sicily ... "), or with a barrage of information tangential to the main topic ("The soil in the Red River Valley of the north is known for its fertility—second, some of the locals say, only to the steppes of Russia ... "), or, perhaps most common on the Web, with personal superfluous information ("My name is John, I've been an amateur gardener for three years, and I created this page using Shovelworks for Imagemaker ... ").

Such indirect beginnings for articles are fine for certain kinds of writing. The anecdotal introduction, for instance, is a storyteller’s staple and can be very effective. (Who could forget Hunter S. Thompson’s beginning to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, first serialized in Rolling Stone: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.") But in most web writing—especially business writing—the best way to begin is with the shortest and clearest statement you can make about your topic.

People on the Web are usually looking for information, and if you make it easy to find, they will thank you. If you make it hard to find by burying what you actually want to communicate in the second or third paragraph, no one may read your article at all: Research shows that web readers scan pages before they read anything, meaning they may scan right past your article if it doesn't have a straightforward heading or introduction that includes key words about your topic.

Writers often opt for indirect introductions because of their own insecurity. They fear that what they have to say will be so unexciting that potential readers will be turned off, so they try to find an indirect but more interesting way to draw the reader in. But doing this actually makes things worse. If you're writing about tomatoes, and the reader isn't interested in tomatoes, it's better to get it over with fast. Readers who've had to wade through several paragraphs before finding out they're in the wrong place will be all the more annoyed.

So be courageous when you sit down to write, and don't blame yourself if it takes a while to come up with an introduction that works. As anyone who's tried to write knows, beginning is often the most difficult part of the writing process. The blank sheet of paper is so anxiety-inducing that it's become a metaphor for writer’s block. Writing for the Web is even worse: Not only is the screen blank, but there in the upper-left-hand corner is the cursor, blinking away as if to mock your inability to get started.


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