Being clear about what your blog posts are about lets people who are interested in what you have to say find your writing more easily. The more paragraphs you spend getting to the point, the bigger the odds they’ll lose patience and click on something else before you’ve presented your thesis.
When publishing articles online, no matter how obscure the subject matter, there is almost always some people who will be into what you have to say. The main thing that keeps them from finding your writing is that they need to discover that it exists. Discovery isn’t made a lick easier by vague titles and long rambling introductions.
After getting to the point, you can elaborate on why that is, get into details and explanations, investigate corner cases and exceptions, in decreasing order of importance.
This is pretty well understood in journalism, where it’s called the inverted pyramid. Originally this was intended to help print newspaper editors who may have needed to truncate an article to fit the layout, but as a side-effect it makes for very effective communication.
No matter where you stop reading, the most important bits will have been communicated already.
This is not the only way of writing an article (and not even the only way I write articles), but it is a reliable template that tends to perform well, and also does well on link aggregators, where many readers head to the comment section after only skimming the first paragraph.
In this post the long isekai-esque title was used as a humorous exaggeration, though honestly these types of titles perform pretty well in the blog space and shouldn’t be slept on. Having titles that are vague and evocative works well in a low noise environment where not a lot of stuff gets published, but the more noise, the better more specific titles seem to perform.
There is also some bleed over into marketing. A surprising number of github repos and landing pages are so busy telling me why I should use their widget, they forget to spell out what it actually does. Yes, I get that it’s blazingly fast and cloud native and has AI integrations, but what does it actually do? It’s very hard to be too clear about what something is and does in a context like that.
One big drawback of these inverted-pyramid style blog posts is that they are sometimes pretty hard to wrap up in a way that feels natural. They tend to either just sort of peter out in an increasingly weakly connected sea of supporting arguments and elaborations, or end very abruptly. You have already presented your conclusion and made your point at the start, so what do you put at the end?
Alternative title for this blog post:
Sure, Mr. Asimov, ‘Foundation’ is an alright title, but did you consider ‘Will Hari Seldon’s elaborate plan to save the humanity from a coming dark age succeed?’
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