Text whose primary goal is conveying information (as opposed to emotion, experience or aesthetics) should be skimming friendly. Time is expensive, words are cheap. Skimming is a vital mode of engaging with text, either to evaluate whether it deserves a deeper read or to extract just the information you need. As a reader, you should nurture your skimming skills. As a writer, you should treat skimmers as a legitimate and important part of your target audience. Among other things it means:
Good title and TLDR/abstract
Clear and useful division into sections
Putting the high-level picture and conclusions first, the technicalities and detailed arguments later. Never leave the reader clueless about where you’re going with something for a long time.
Visually emphasize the central points and make them as self-contained as possible. For example, in the statement of mathematical theorems avoid terminology whose definition is hidden somewhere in the bulk of the text.
Stronger: as a writer you should assume your modal reader is a skimmer, both because they are, and because even non skimmers are only going to remember about the same number of things that the good skimmer does.
Text whose primary goal is conveying information (as opposed to emotion, experience or aesthetics) should be skimming friendly. Time is expensive, words are cheap. Skimming is a vital mode of engaging with text, either to evaluate whether it deserves a deeper read or to extract just the information you need. As a reader, you should nurture your skimming skills. As a writer, you should treat skimmers as a legitimate and important part of your target audience. Among other things it means:
Good title and TLDR/abstract
Clear and useful division into sections
Putting the high-level picture and conclusions first, the technicalities and detailed arguments later. Never leave the reader clueless about where you’re going with something for a long time.
Visually emphasize the central points and make them as self-contained as possible. For example, in the statement of mathematical theorems avoid terminology whose definition is hidden somewhere in the bulk of the text.
Stronger: as a writer you should assume your modal reader is a skimmer, both because they are, and because even non skimmers are only going to remember about the same number of things that the good skimmer does.