If You Remember This Metaphor, You'll Never Get the Opening of Your Posts Wrong Again
Readers are hungry.
You lift the lid off the pot, and the water is there, ready. Super hot.
Big bubbles rise from the bottom and burst on the surface.
Throw in the spaghetti. Exactly 11 minutes. Drain, and you sit down at the table for dinner.
Ready.
Now, look at this other dinner, with the pot still closed, sitting in the cabinet next to the fridge.
You fill it with water. You can cheat a little by using hot tap water to cut down on prep time.
But the bubbles will still be tiny, the kind that barely rise to the surface from the bottom.
You put the lid back on and double-check that the gas is turned all the way up.
You could toss in the pasta even like this, but you know exactly what you’ll get from cooking at a low temperature.
So you wait a little longer, and finally, the big bubbles come. Beautiful, large bubbles bursting with heat.
Throw away the spaghetti. 11minutes, and when you sit down at the table, you realize you’ve lost your appetite because you spoiled it snacking here and there while waiting for the water to boil and the pasta to cook.
If the lid is the title of your post, the water is your content, and the pasta is the reader’s desire to find something in your content, then it’s best to have everything ready and at full heat right away.
If you delay with preambles and introductions, and by the second line of text you still haven’t explained why you’re there, chances are you’re trying to seat someone at the table who, by the time the pasta is ready, won’t be hungry anymore.
The reader is almost always hungry, and you have to feed them right away, with big spoonfuls. Don’t give them the chance to look up from the plate until it’s all gone.
There’s no more time for preambles, nor for endless conclusions.
Start with your point right away, by the third line.
No one will ever complain that you didn’t entertain them with an introduction they would’ve never read, anyway.