“Prose is architecture,” said Ernest Hemingway. “It’s not interior design.”

When you write, you’re building something. Specifically, when you’re writing corporate communications, content marketing or public relations messages, you’re building an argument.

So what organizing structure would make the best foundation for your message?

Many of us learned early on that the inverted pyramid was the only way to organize information. Because of that, most communicators are so committed to the inverted pyramid that we married it in college, have sustained a monogamous relationship with it over the years and have made lots of babies with it.

Friends, it’s time to start flirting around with some other forms.

Why topple the inverted pyramid style?

Why do away with the pyramid — and choose the feature-style structure instead?

More than 25 years of research tells us that the inverted pyramid works beautifully for distributing information over a telegraph wire, it does not work so well with a little subset of your audience known as humans.

Here’s a quick survey:

• The inverted pyramid was invented during the Civil War — for use on the telegraph wire. Does this 150-year-old hierarchical blurtation of facts really make the most sense for your contemporary blog posts, webpages and online content?
• The pyramid does “not work very well with readers,” according to the Ways With Words study. It reduced readership, understanding and engagement, among other things.
• Feature-style stories outperform traditional news stories in readership, satisfaction and image, according to the Impact study. “There is strong evidence that an increase in the [number] of feature-style stories has wide-ranging benefits,” write the researchers.
• The Associated Press is backing away from the inverted pyramid. The godfather of the pyramid is embracing the feature and foregoing its classic Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” style. The feature delivers more context — and attention, AP leaders say.
• Feature stories get shared more often, according to the Reuters Institute. While news stories make up the bulk of the content on three European news sites, most of the most-shared stories are features.
• Features increased reading by 520%, readers by 300% in an A/B test by Groove HQ. Simply adding an anecdotal lead caused nearly three times as many people to scroll to the bottom of the post and increased time on page by more than five times.
• The inverted pyramid is ‘the worst form ever invented for explaining something to another person in words,” according to a Poynter Institute scholar. That’s because it’s so hard to understand and remember.
• The inverted pyramid is the “anti-story,” akin to starting Cinderella with the wedding scene. “It tells the story backward and is at odds with the storytelling tradition,” experts say.

Don’t count on the pyramid.

So start seeing the inverted pyramid as one approach, not the approach.

“The inverted pyramid is one more tool in my toolbox, right for some jobs but by no means all,” writes Todd McAdam, public affairs reporter at the Press & Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, New Hampshire). “In particular, it’s a hammer. I use it when I need nothing more to get the news out than brute force and ignorance. Not subtle, not pretty, not very flexible, but very useful in the right circumstance.”

Which, for corporate communicators, is not very often.

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What if I told you there was a free tool available that would help you convince readers to read your messages more often, read them more completely and spend more time reading them? Would you use it?

And what if I told you there was another tool out there that reduced readership and made people stop reading sooner? Would you stop using it? How quickly would you get rid of it?

My friend, these tools exist. The first — the one that encourages reading — is the feature-style story structure. The second one, the one that reduces reading, is the inverted pyramid.

And if you don’t know, now you know.

Feature structure increases reading.

Feature-style stories are easier to read than the traditional inverted-pyramid news structure, according to “Impact,” a 2001 study led by the Readership Institute at Northwestern University and sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Making messages more “easy to read” is one of the best ways to increase readership, the study found. That is, according to the study, the higher the score on “easy to read,” the more likely people are to:

• Read the paper more often
• Read it more completely
• Spend more time reading it

“Easy to read” includes “is relaxing to read” and “makes it easy to find what I’m looking for.”

Inverted pyramids reduce reading.

Inverted pyramids, on the other hand, scored lowest in readership of four structures studied.

That’s according to “Ways With Words,” a 1993 project of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Poynter Institute, the St. Petersburg Times and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The inverted pyramid also tanked in getting the reader across the jump, which means it made people stop reading sooner.

Why? The pyramid starts out boring and “gets more boring as the reader reads down,” “Ways With Words” researchers said. Who needs to stick around for that?

AP uses features to ‘draw in the reader.’

One solution: Write more feature-style stories.

You won’t be alone. The Associated Press is now including a feature lead in addition to a news lead with every story it sends across the wire, according to The New York Times.

Why? The feature leads are more likely to “draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means,” according to the nation’s dominant news service.

Why not join the AP? After all, who would keep using a tool that doesn’t work when there’s a free tool out there that does?

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The feature-style story structure — aka the “stack of blocks” — is more memorable than the traditional news structure.

“While the inverted pyramid is the worst form for readers, the ‘stack of blocks’ is the best in terms of reader comprehension,” writes Don Fry, an independent writing coach who represents The Poynter Institute.

“The stack has three parts: beginning, middle, and end. The middle contains the information grouped by subject matter into parts arranged in logical order. The beginning predicts the middle in form and content, and the ending cements the main points into the readers’ memories.”

Emmy award-winning journalist Tim Knight goes a step further in a 2015 rant, “Screw the Inverted Pyramid.” The inverted pyramid, he writes, is “cleverly designed to prevent the viewer from retaining information.”

Want them to remember? Think features, not pyramids.

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Brands that run more feature-style stories are seen as being more:

• Honest
• Fun
• Neighborly
• Intelligent
• Personable
• Thought-provoking
• In the know
• In touch with reader values

That’s according to “Impact,” a 2001 study led by the Readership Institute at Northwestern University and sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Want to get some of that for your brand? Run more feature-style stories.

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