Intro The Objective Gardener vs Architect Writing Markdown Tricks Conclusion Copy and Paste Outline

It may have become obvious to you by now that long form articles written by the post author tend to get more sats than links. Have you noticed, however, that well formatted articles obtain substantially more sats than walls of text alone?

Its incredibly difficult as a reader to pay attention to text alone paragraph after focus demanding paragraph. As a poster, I have good reason not to teach these techniques (as a poster you're my competition for sats right?), but as a user and a fan of many of the authors who have posted here, I just have to share it, because its just so difficult to finish even an article on an entertaining topic when it isn't well formatted.

I'll be outlining what and why you should format your articles this way, sprinkling some extras you could add at the risk of making the post look gaudy, but the benefit that if you know how to do it just right, the payoff will set you apart from other writers, and finally I'll be leaving you with an outline¹ just beyond my conclusion paragraph for you to copy and paste as a starting point for your next article.

First, its important to talk about why. Why are we taking this extra time to make the article look pretty? Why does that result in more sats? Why are people more likely to read it?

Attention

After the first paragraph I as the reader will feel drained. I've put effort into reading and trying to understand what I'm meant to be reading between those lines and without an indication from the author "Here reader, this is a good place to stop and reflect on what you've read" I'll just keep reading, or stop because its become too much.

Why does the reader stop instead of taking a break?

In the book "Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard", that author describes people decision making process akin to a rider on an elephant. The elephant is the impulsive side and the rider is the logical side. After a while, the rider will get tired of pulling on the reigns and the elephant will decide everything.

So, to give you a break from pulling on that elephant, I've given you a picture to stop at. Its not some simple picture you could easily ignore and move away from. Its interesting in and of itself. Almost completely removed from its original context, but relevant to the post enough to belong there. Its a real playground for you to stop and have some fun at before you move on to the next highlight.

The good news is, you can do all of this after you've written your article. You don't need to make your article follow the outline. However, generally speaking, you want your article to have some purpose. A point to gnaw at the back of the readers mind long after they've logged out (heh, imagine logging out)

These days, I write my articles at the flow of my thoughts and neaten them up in a nice bow with a headline that describes what the point of that set of paragraphs is after the fact. (for example, the outline was supposed to come immediately after my intro, but because I had more to say, I just packaged that under a header) This allows readers to skip portions they feel is of less value to them, but also helps the reader feel that you aren't going off the rails into a ramble, because you've already set the stage of what you're talking about. This retroactive titling is known as the gardener style, because the article grows in whatever direction it naturally wants to go.

Whereas the architect plans out an outline and fills it in with content. My formula for when I wrote with an architect style was thus:

I would always be sure I had at least 3 headers plus my intro and conclusion. Does this sound familiar? Yes my brother in Homni, your grade school English classes if put to use can help you earn sats in this era.

In addition to this layout, a higher effort article makes sufficient use of markdown.

To go over the markdown I've used in this post, we have:

These tricks if overused can become gaudy. I think I made this article a little gaudy to be honest here. The only reason for that is because I'm trying to show what can be done though.

While many of you have such interesting things to write about, I feel you aren't getting the sats you deserve simply because you didn't hold your audiences attention well enough. I truely believe that there are articles on this site that would have garnered thousands of sats (but only attracted hundreds) purely because of the formatting.

So get our attention, let us know what your paragraph is about before getting into it, give us little breaks with pictures, and overall make your articles pleasing to look at. I ask this of you as your fan.

# Table of contents [Intro](#Intro) [Main point 1](#Main-point-1) [Main point 2](#Main-point-2) [Main point 3](#Main-point-3) [Conclusion](#Conclusion)

***

# Intro a. Attention getter (relate attention getter to a picture?) b. Overview of article content *** [Interesting picture](picture link.jpg) ***

# Main point 1

a. Evidence 1 b. Evidence 2

*** [Interesting picture](picture link.jpg) ***

# Main point 2

a. Evidence 1 [^1] b. Evidence 2

*** [Interesting picture](picture link.jpg) ***

# Main point 3

a. Evidence 1 b. Evidence 2

*** [Interesting picture](picture link.jpg) ***

# Conclusion

*** [Goodbye sendoff picture](sendoff.jpg) ***

[^1]: Footnotes if you have any