Profound title, I know. But Simon Willison pointed out something that really made me frame writing in a different way: you have a few seconds to capture the viewer's attention on TikTok before they swipe. The same principle should apply to your writing.

gwern's First, Make Me Care blog was the instigator for Simon's comment, where they argue you need a hook to make the reader invest their time in your writing, and the subsequent really hit home.

“Venice built a maritime empire from a city that couldn’t feed itself; so who fed it—and why didn’t its enemies simply starve it out?”

This sentence creates a question you want answered, and you continue reading. But most nonfiction introductions don’t do that. They start with fatal background (“Venice was founded after the fall of the Roman Empire…”), and the reader quits.

They say the following:

A good blog or essay will hook the reader from the start. It can be the title, or the summary, or introduction, but it needs to convince them that their time will be well-spent.

Just describing something cool will work, but you can also provoke the reader’s curiosity. And you can do that by drawing their attention to a gap in their knowledge: describing a problem they don’t know how to solve, or pointing out an anomaly. When you have created an itch, by provoking a response like “huh, I never thought about that”, you can then bring the reader along in an exploration of the topic, where you try to understand it together

Good reminder not to get lazy assuming the reader is interested in what you have to say. Make them.

P.S. A response to those who say 'text is dead'