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Comment by danybittel | Hacker News Reader

Vicky is not talking about the a story structure. If you followed a story structure, you start with how you've been (I always loved windows), then what happened (I got an automatic update), then piles of problems (The computer wouldn't start, lost some data, couldn't reinstall windows) then the solution (until I installed Linux) the moral (use Linux).

Vickys structure is sort of the opposite. Start with the most important part (You should use Linux), go deeper (for example Gnome, for desktop) or add surprise (it's very easy to install), open the conversation with a question (do you use Linux?) or close it with an answer (it doesn't have automatic updates).

That's why this blog post is kind of a mess, with conflicting ideas.

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That's how newspaper articles are structured (the second part you mention), start off with the important bit (there was a car crash no one was hurt) then add more details as paragraphs proceed, if someone wants to know more they keep reading.

Of course the web has sort of ruined this, but I'm talking old school newspapers.

That's one annoying thing with modern articles. You have to wade through paragraphs and paragraphs of "John grew up a taxidermist's son and bla bla bla bla..." before you even get to what the article is supposed to be about.

Then you get a couple of on-topic sentences followed by another deluge of fluff.

Oldschool newspapers were great because space was at such a premium that this kind of garbage wouldn't happen.

Try reading a recipe for a simple chocolate cake. You get the author’s deep rooted trauma of being that weird kid shamed in HS for some reason as well as over sharing of political stances on the war in Ukraine ending with promoting penny stocks or some MLM pyramid scheme. FFS just give me ingredients and steps.

"We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe. So, I decided to go to Morganville - which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumble bees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, they'd say. Now where was I... Oh yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones."

- Abe Simpson

> FFS just give me ingredients and steps.

The commonly believed reason is that a simple list of ingredients and steps would not be copyrightable. So they add fluff which can be copyrighted.

I mean it's pretty clearly just to get you to scroll past more ads. You would not need nearly so much text just to qualify for copyright.

I thought it started with the google algorithm rewarding more body text and high linger-time. Sites that just present info concisely are down ranked (then google extracts the concise info from long time-wasting sites and puts it directly on their search page—a whole thriving ecosystem of bullshit jobs, but at least now we can automate every part of that!)

Recipes generally cannot be copyrighted. But the filler text, that definitely can be, and is. So if I wrap my recipe in a pointless anecdote, I make it that much harder for The Unscrupulous Gourmet to use a web scraper to steal my recipe.

Although people are talking about copyright, the real reason is SEO. If you write just the recipe, your site appears lower in the search results than those with all the fluff (or so it was believed).

Ask most of the people who write those recipes - they claim to hate writing all that fluff, and that's why all of them have a "Jump to recipe" link.

See this, for example: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-explains-how-it-r...

Hence the classic newsroom refrain: “Don’t bury the lede!”

The 'inverted pyramid' - in some ways, its value is emphasised by how we consume media these days. In others (dark patterns, attention economy), it's deliberately ignored.

A historian I know rants a lot about the fashion to write historic books in anything but chronological order.

There's a lot of machinery in our brains that automatically parse chronological stories for dependencies and correlations. If you break up the order you throw it all away and everything becomes manual. It makes it easier to force people to agree with your interpretation, nothing feels "off".

It's like writing sequential imperative code vs a bunch of callbacks. Pretty obvious what's easier to debug.

The second part is the structure I tell everyone to use in presentations - and yeah, its explicitly not narrative. I have a conclusion, so that goes up front - it's the most important part, it goes first. Then the second row rank of assumptions which support the conclusion go next, and only then do you start doing the background on how some of those are reached - if it matters.

I find it's as much a writing tool as it is useful for getting to the point quickly with presentations: the goal of presentation is not to surprise the audience, or have a clever twist. It's to be plain, open and honest.

(Which is to say, anytime you don't see this structure in any context other then fiction, you're probably being market pitched and what you see is fiction).

>the goal of presentation is not to surprise the audience, or have a clever twist. It's to be plain, open and honest.

Sometimes it is.

>you're probably being market pitched and what you see is fiction

Sometimes you are being market pitched.

It's all Steve Jobs did yet he's the classic example of good Power Point presentations.

Most story structures start with exposition, i.e. the background info. However this is quite boring normally so to get you through that they often add a "hook". That's what's being suggested here. So normally a story is hook, exposition, conflict, resolution. That's what's being suggested here, just not very clearly.

There is the ideal form for Executives:

- Summary - Conclusion - Results - Analysis - Hypothesis - Context - Context

There is the ideal form for Researchers:

- Problem Statement (Abstract) - Context - Context - Hypothesis - Analysis - Results - Conclusion

Almost opposite ordering

In academic circles, the abstract is typically a summary, not a problem statement. The rest of the sections are usually read out of order, so it's actually not that different.

Don't bore us, get to the chorus.

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