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Comment by Hard_Space | Hacker News Reader

> Many articles begin with a human framing, even those about highly technical topics. Having established a relatable hook, the author quickly moves on to the general point of the piece, before returning at the end to the mid-Western accountant they opened with.

Radically disagree with this. Starting everything from recipes to teardowns with a story about your first dog is getting to be a real curse of the internet lately.

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I guess it's a matter of preference. I often dislike this approach in talks on technical conferences, where the current trend seems to be to spin everything into a personal story, even when it's clearly forced. I don't mind reading a blog where there technical part is wrapped into "I had this real-life problem and it boiled down to solving this software bug ..." kind of a story.

I agree about avoiding those long, terrible, narratives that introduce something completely unrelated, but I don't think he's suggesting that. Framing can simply be one opening sentence that states the real life human problem you're solving (the "why" they should read it that he's talking about). That should be following by the lede -- which is the solution to the problem you just mentioned. The rest of the writing is your proof of the solution.

It's a pretty simple formula that works. I've been doing it since 2009 and my blog has won copy writing awards and a webby award.

I think the "quickly" in your quote is the crux for me. I'm quite happy to read a paragraph or so of anecdata that provides a useful or motivating analogy/story.

OTOH, if your article is 3k words, I'll be gone if your 'relatable hook' appears to be a third of the article. Weave it in, be didactic!

I read both types. Sometimes I want the short and to-the-point version and sometimes I want the long form with a story. I think there's a place for both. Write in the way that makes sense for your personality.

I think the key difference is the audience. For a lot of food bloggers that share their recipes, the initial group of readers is loyal fans. They want to hear the stories and the recipe is almost secondary.

When you find a recipe through search, you want the recipe and have to wade through the story and the photos to get to it and that's frustrating. Oddly enough, it's also what may help that article rank higher in search too.

If it's too artificial, that's right. But, answering the question "why am I blogging about that? Why is that important?" is a great way to start an article. And, most of the time, you can do it with a story-like setup.

I think doing so is a major mistake. The reader found the text through either searching or reference (like a link on HN), and thus the answer "why am I reading this" is already provided before they even loaded the site. It is much better to hook the reader with what makes the text unique, confirming the decision to continue reading, and then further down explain why this is important, the history, and why the author is writing about it.

Indeed, but IMO that's the role of the "chapô" (not sure about the English word there; abstract? leading paragraph? I mean the short first paragraph, sometimes written in a different font, that's here to engage the reader). So, in an article titled "is blogging still relevant?", that first paragraph could be something like

"Contrary to popular belief, blogging is still a viable economic activity nowadays. Finding readers may be harder than before, and require some more efforts from the reader, though".

And, then, have your article start as a pure story :

"You're in front of your computer, facing the blank screen. Finding ideas is hard, today. You start asking yourself "Does it even make sense? Bah, nobody will read my prose anyway". Then, you close your word processor and look for the new cat video, thinking it's a better use of your time. Well, you couldn't be more wrong. Blah blah..."

OR, after the leading paragraph, you could still use a narrative stucture (setup, problem, attempts to solve the problem), but in a low profile version, ie without the made up character:

"Numbers don't lie: there are 10 times more blogs nowadays than 5 years ago, and people spend 5 times less time on blogs, since they spend most of their online time on facebook or instagram. One might wonder if starting a new blog today still makes sense. Well, first, blah blah..."

Agreed. If you’re trying that hard to build a relatable hook, maybe what you’re writing about just simply isn’t that important/useful?

I had to think about why this bothers me so much. I read HN a lot and there's a wide range of quality. So even though I actually like human framing conceptually, having to wade through it before figuring out if the article is worth reading in the first place is bothersome.

The recipe thing is 100% driven by SEO, and yes, it's annoying, even to most of the people who are forced to do it if they want their recipes to rank.

Beyond that, I don't see an increasing trend of this on the internet or elsewhere, nor do I think it's a mistake or even unpopular. Features have been written this way for a very long time, vs the "inverted pyramid" style of news articles. Done well, it's a great format, even if the grumpy HN crowd typically finds it too meandering and relational and anecdotal and would (allegedly) prefer a bullet point list of the facts :)

Definitely agree.

Writing on the Internet, especially informative writing, needs to be crystal clear and clean.

You'd like my website.

I did my entire 'human framing' in a single paragraph on a single "Its January 2017, next steps" article.

It was my worst performing article, now I only release studies.

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