I just noticed half the articles I read this week make you wade through 6–8 paragraphs of scene-setting before the thesis shows up — why do we do it that way? Last night on my phone I counted 7 grafs before the actual claim in a 1,200-word piece, and I bailed; is this an SEO thing or am I impatient?
I fixed this by forcing a one-sentence thesis in the first two lines — ‘nut graf by graf 2’ — and pushing the scene-setting under a subhead; on my phone this cut bounce on 1,200-word pieces. Are you mostly hitting these on your phone at night? It’s less SEO than retention, though long ramps still work for true narratives.
, same here — on my phone, seven grafs before the claim is a bail trigger. If you don’t want to move the nut graf like @bravelens15, drop a one-line ‘TL;DR’ standfirst under the hed so the thesis hits by line two while keeping the scene-setter below.
I draft the thesis as a question in the first sentence — “Why are intros getting so long?” — and answer it in sentence two; the scene-setting can follow, and on a 1,200-word piece it cut my mobile bails before the “7 grafs” mark. If it’s a true narrative feature, I let the opening breathe.