Nielsen made the point a while back (1996) that writing on the web should be chunky, a thing that is generally known, but he added, a thing we are only dimly aware of, that the inverted pyramid convention still applies to this rhetorical environment. This should lead to the natural conclusion that writing on the web is an exercise in discrete (call it “bursty”) storytelling. We write on the web (or should do so) like French restaurants serve their filet mignons, that is, in pieces a little larger than a quarter (mignon literarly means “small,” even “dainty”). The need for context and volume is offered by juxtaposition, by aggregation. Isn’t this what blogging is all about, after all?
From Nielsen’s website USEIT (Writing Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace):
In other words, the Web is a linking medium and we know from hypertext theory that writing for interlinked information spaces is different than writing linear flows of text. In fact, George Landow, a Professor of English literature, coined the phrases rhetoric of departure and rhetoric of arrival to indicate the need for both ends of the link to give users some understanding of where they can go as well as why the arrival page is of relevance to them.Therefore, we would expect Web writers to split their writing into smaller, coherent pieces to avoid long scrolling pages. Each page would be structured as an inverted pyramid, but the entire work would seem more like a set of pyramids floating in cyberspace than as a traditional “article”. Unfortunately, it is hard to learn this new writing style. I am certainly not there yet myself, as you can see.
As a resource for this see also Writing from the Top Down: Pros and Cons of the Inverted
Pyramid
(I ran into this idea while reading a Slate critique of the book that brought us the revelation that NSA has been tapping for some time domestic phone conversations of American residents with potential terrorist cells outside the US. The conclusion is that the newspaper articles written by the book author are better than the book itself. This should be no surprise, I think. Books written by journalists suffer from narrative incontinence often. Some of the authors are so eager to take revenge on decades of newsroon slavery that when unleased in what seems like the Coliseum of a book drift into unspeakable orgies of verbiosity and lyricism).