The feature-style story structure attracts 300% more readers and increases reading by 520%, according to an A/B test by Groove HQ.

Simply adding an anecdotal lead — the team didn’t change any other content — caused nearly three times as many people to scroll to the bottom of the post. It also increased time on page by more than five times.

Alex Turnbull, founder and CEO of Groove, suggests, among other things:

• Starting with a scenario
• Adding dialog to an anecdote
• Focusing on emotions

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Source: Alex Turnbull, “The Power of Storytelling: How We Got 300% More People To Read Our Content,” Buffer, March 22, 2016

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“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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If I told you there was a communication tool that reduces readership, diminishes understanding and causes engagement to take a nosedive, would you use it?

Friends, there is such a tool, and you are using it every day. It’s called the inverted pyramid.

That’s what researchers learned in the  “Ways With Words” (PDF) study, a collaboration of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the St. Petersburg Times and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For the study, St. Petersburg Times beat reporters covered their regular beats, writing four versions of each story:

• Inverted pyramid, the traditional news structure
• Narrative, or storytelling with a beginning, middle and end
• Opinion piece, offering a visible point of view
• Radical clarity, where the reporter explains everything that might possibly be explained. So if you mention dog, for instance, you might add “a four-legged canine domesticated for human companionship.”

Then, in phone interviews, researchers asked subscribers:

• How much of the story they read
• Whether they followed the jump
• What they understood, using true-or-false questions
• How fair and balancedthe story was
• Whether they cared about the subject — including whether the stories connected with their own experiences and made them want to find out more or get involved

The results?

The pyramid tanks

The inverted pyramid does “not work very well with readers,” researchers concluded.

Specifically, the inverted pyramid:

• Scored lowest in readership and getting the reader across the jump. The inverted pyramid starts out boring and “gets more boring as the reader reads down,” researchers said. Who needs to stick around for the rest of that?
• Scored lowest in understanding.“Journalists put background and context in the second half of the pyramid, so the reader who does not know that background cannot understand the top of the story,” researchers said. “As a result, only journalists and sources can fully understand inverted-pyramid stories.” Is that your audience?
• Made a mediocre showing in “involvement,”or whether the story made readers connect with and want to get involved in the topic. In our business, we call involvement “engagement.” Note that engagement and the inverted pyramid are mutually exclusive.

Why are we still using this thing?

The feature structure soars

The feature, or narrative, structure, on the other hand, tended to outperform the other structures in the study. Features scored highest of all of the formats in reading and getting readers across the jump. They also made a good showing in understanding.

Instead of sticking with the inverted pyramid, a story structure that’s been proven in the lab not to work, you’d think writers would stick a fork in it, then go experiment with other story structures. But no.

“The basic conservatism and frantic pace of our profession keeps us from enlarging our repertoire of forms,” the researchers lamented. “So … we keep boring and confusing our readers, and driving them away. … We should think of the inverted pyramid as A form, rather than THE form.”

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Source: “Ways With Words: A Research Report of the Literacy Committee,” American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1993

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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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At about the time this Union soldier marched off to war, journalists invented the traditional news structure that you use every day.

Let’s pause and ponder that for a minute.

You know the inverted pyramid — that hierarchical blurtation of facts that starts with the most important element and moves to the least.

It’s often paired with the fact pack, where you stuff who, what, when, where, why and how into the first paragraph. (I always wondered, if you cover all the W’s in the lead, what’s left for the second paragraph?)

But where did this thing come from?

Have you seen the movie ‘Lincoln’?

The inverted pyramid was invented in the late 19^th century, the product of a then-new communications technology, the telegraph, which was invented in 1854.

The telegraph meant that for the first time, reporters could get war stories home from battle without engaging a man on horseback to take the story back home.

That made the Civil War one of the golden ages of newspaper reporting. For the first time, readers could learn about battles in real time — or what passed for real time back in the day.

Before the telegraph, reporters told war stories chronologically: Two great armies meet on a hill. The first shot is fired; a man goes down on this side. Another shot is volleyed, and a soldier dies over here.

But what happens to a telegraph wire that runs along the ground during a ground war? Bullets hit it; corpses fall on it; cannon balls land on it, and the wire gets cut.

Send a chronological story over a telegraph wire, it could get interrupted at any point: Two great armies — rrrrip! — and the story is over.

Hierarchical replaces chronological order.

So reporters started telling stories in hierarchical order: The blue team won! “Oh, I have more time; what a luxury.” Twenty men died! “Even more time; isn’t that nice?” And on and on until the story got out or the wire got cut, whichever came first.

And thus began the hierarchical blurtation of facts that is the inverted pyramid.

The evolution of linotype reinforced the pyramid. Editors dealing with columns of lead found it easier to cut stories from the bottom rather than tweaking them from the middle.

These days, 25 years of research tells us that while the inverted pyramid worked beautifully for distributing information over a telegraph wire, it does not work so well with readers.

When to use the inverted pyramid

That doesn’t mean there’s never a time to use the inverted pyramid. Use the traditional news format whenever you need to:

1. Communicate urgent information. If the building were on fire, for instance, you wouldn’t want a feature lead. As the flames licked the secretary’s desk on the first floor … No, you’d want me to say, “The building’s on fire! Get out of the building now!”
2. Share bad news. Communicating about layoffs? Let’s skip the feature lead where we paint a picture of the glorious new life readers will lead as they get to pursue a brand-new career. Instead write as clearly and cleanly as you can. Avoid obfuscation.
3. Distribute your story via telegraph wire. Enough said.

For the rest of the time, writers must master an approach that works when the inverted pyramid doesn’t. And that approach is the feature-style story structure.

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Source: Chip Scanlan, “Birth of the Inverted Pyramid: A Child of Technology, Commerce and History,” PoynterOnline, Dec. 17, 2003

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If I told you there was a communication tool that reduces readership, diminishes understanding and causes engagement to take a nosedive, would you use it?

Friends, there is such a tool, and I am afraid you are using it every day. It’s called the inverted pyramid. And, according to “Ways With Words,” a classic study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, it does “not work well with readers.”

The problem with the pyramid

“Ways With Words” researchers studied four story structures and found that traditional, inverted-pyramid stories:

• “Do not work well with readers,” and “did not justify their predominance in today’s newspapers.”
• Scored low in readership and understanding.
• Made a mediocre showing in “involvement,” or whether the story made readers care about the news. (In our business, we call this “engagement.”)
• Were the least effective at getting the reader to the jump of all story forms studied.

Researchers identified two problems with the inverted pyramid:

• “The story gets more boring as the reader reads down.”
• “Journalists put background and context in the second half of the pyramid, so the reader who does not know that background cannot understand the top of the story. As a result, only journalists and sources can fully understand inverted-pyramid stories.”

Why are we still using this thing?

Back away from the pyramid.

Instead of sticking with a story form that’s been proven in the lab not to work, you’d think writers would experiment with other story structures. But, the researchers lamented:

Amen.

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