Avoid Pyramid Schemes and Draw Readers in With the Feature-Style Story Structure

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It was the end of a long day training engineers to write marketing materials at a Fortune 500 tech company.

These folks had deep moral concerns about the whole endeavor: They seemed convinced that producing “marketing fluff” was akin to murdering kittens.

By 4 p.m., I was the only one who had smiled, spoken or attempted eye contact.

But then I demonstrated the feature-style story structure. The leader leaned in. I’m not saying he smiled, but his lips moved.

“This isn’t writing,” he said. “It’s thinking.”

Isn’t that the real secret of great writing? People don’t need more words. They need clearer thinking.

And the best way to deliver that is through the feature-style story structure.

Why the feature-style story structure?

The inverted pyramid turns out to be “a pyramid scheme,” says my brilliant client Chelsea Ornelas, communication director at Sourcewell.

Indeed, researchers have found that the feature structure outperforms the inverted pyramid at helping readers:

Process information more efficiently, stay engaged longer and remember more of what they’d read.
Pay closer attention and remember more because the information follows a continuous, story-like flow.
Understand and remember complex information more clearly than with just-the-facts-ma’am structures.

So let’s build a feature-style story structure …

Set your story up in the introduction.

Get your story started with three quick paragraphs:

Grab attention in the lead. Show, don’t tell, with human interest, a statistic or storytelling. Don’t start by ‘splainin’ the topic: That’s boring, and you’ll lose readers before you begin. Remember, they’ve just read the headline; they already know the gist of the piece.
Tell them where you’re taking them in the nut paragraph. Put the story into a nutshell. Focus on what’s happening and why they should care.
Orient them with one paragraph of background information. This might be a history lesson, broader context or a definition.

Build the story out in the body.

Instead of a hierarchical blurtation of facts, organize the body into clearly labeled, self-contained parts.

You might organize by:

Location (In the East Coast office … )
Theme (Problem 1, Problem 2 …)
Time (Before, During, After)
Hierarchy (Most important to least important)

Include in each section:

A strong subhead (or maybe a list with bold-faced lead-ins)
A short explanation
Bullets and bold-face to break things up

Just like I’m doing here.

Wrap up the story in the conclusion.

Draw to a conclusion in the wrap up. You might make the penultimate paragraph a call to action. Or tell ’em what you told ’em by restating your nut graph.
End with a bang in the kicker. Leave a lasting impression with a concrete detail: a short anecdote, quote or twist that echoes the lead.

It’s not writing. It’s thinking.

When you choose the feature-style story structure, you’re choosing your readers. You’re drawing them in, lifting them out of the hierarchical slippery slide of the inverted pyramid, guiding them step by step, and helping them care.

You’re not arranging facts; you’re arranging attention.

Somewhere out there, an audience member is trying not to smile. And you’re about to make their lips move.

Watch Ann Wylie on the Nov. 18 episode of Strategies & Tactics Live:

Ann Wylie (WylieComm.com) helps PR professionals Catch Your Readers through writing training. Her workshops take her from Hollywood to Helsinki, helping communicators in organizations like Coca-Cola, Toyota, Eli Lilly and Salesforce draw readers in and move them to act. Never miss a tip: FreeWritingTips.wyliecomm.com.

Illustration credit: s.sitta+h