I have to do this in my emails. Most people just ignore the second and third sentences in a paragraph. No idea why, drives me crazy - but this does help.
You can tell they don't read them because they ask questions that were answered in them.
You can tell they don't read them because they ask questions that were answered in them.
Because that tends to be how people skim.
If the first sentence of a paragraph doesn't catch their attention in some way, they subconsciously assume that the rest of the paragraph (which is presumably related) doesn't need to be read.
Also please rehearse what you would say to your family if you got into a car wreck and they wanted to check you out at the hospital versus “mom is going into surgery for massive hemorrhaging.”
“Hey son, we’re okay, but we got into a bad fender bender and we’re getting checked out at Hoskin’s Hospital. The car is dead so can you come pick us up, maybe bring X and Y and have your sister check on the cats?”
Is a way shorter moment of sheer terror than switching around the sentence fragments at the beginning. Also if you’re a boss having an unscheduled meeting with someone, stalling the agenda is just torturing the other person.
Help people triage. Make the urgency clear in the first couple words. Don't just send "hi" and then wait for a response, nor "X is down" when someone else is already on it and you're just giving them an FYI.
The military expression is BLUF - Bottom Line Up Front. (It works for paragraphs as well as for entire documents.)
> Not publishing one sentence per line, no. Write like this for your eyes only. HTML or Markdown combine separate lines into one paragraph.
/s