David Burrowes' Blog

Presenting the conclusions first often makes a document more interesting to read and actually helps orient the reader, though it may take more effort to create.

I was working with a friend, recently, who was writing an essay for a graduate school application. The structure of his essay was basically: "Point1, point2, point3, point4, thus conclusion". The content was all good, but it felt heavy and uninteresting.

I suggested that he change the structure. Something more like: "Conclusion, because point1, point2, point3, point4". When he did this, not only was his essay much more engaging, but it was very easy to see how his points fit into a larger picture.

Today, I was reviewing more of our documentation, and realized it is doing the same thing as my friend's initial draft of his essay, but on a much larger scale (tens of pages, rather than tens of lines). In order to understand how to do a particular task, the documentation takes you through the whole infrastructure and concludes with the actual steps of the process. The result is very difficult to read, because as you must remember everything without knowing why you are remembering it. Only when you are done do you know how each fact is supposed to fit together. So the effort to read it is very large. Not very usable.

This does beg the question: Why do we end up writing documents (including blog entries!) in this unusable way? I think one reason is because it is the easiest thing to do. If I have a conclusion to make, it is much easier to think through (and write) the support for it one step at a time. Then when I reach the conclusion I'm sure I've made my arguments to support it. Another reason may be that there may be some psychological benefit (to the writer) of delaying telling the reader the answer until the end. You get to do the "I'm the expert, let me keep you guessing until I've revealed my brilliance." thing. And some may be simply the (misguided) notion that my reader needs to understand the details before they can understand the conclusion.

In any case, this is another example of how making something usable is not necessarily "obvious" from the point of view of the person doing the creation. It may even involve more work (doing a full first draft that ends with a conclusion, and then a full second draft that starts with the conclusion). However, the results can be substantially different.