> When writing, first, make the reader care, one way or another. Because if I am not hooked by the first screen, I will probably not keep reading—no matter how good the rest of it is!
First, Make Me Care
Just describing something cool will work, but you can also provoke the reader’s curiosity. And you can do that by drawing their attention to a gap in their knowledge: describing a problem they don’t know how to solve, or pointing out an anomaly. When you have created an itch, by provoking a response like “huh, I never thought about that”, you can then bring the reader along in an exploration of the topic, where you try to understand it together, in the original Montaigne sense of “essay”. (This “create a need and resolve it” scaffolding is a mainstay of the “classic style”.)