Structuring a post for someone reading it between two meetings

What a reader between meetings actually does with a post

They triage. A senior reader with four minutes before the next call is running a sorting operation, not a reading one, and the sort has three landing points: the first line, any line that carries a numeral, and the last line they can see. Everything between those points is scenery until they decide the post is worth a click on see more.

Almost everything written about readability is written from the writer's side of the desk. Short paragraphs, white space, a hook formula, a rule about sentence length. All of that describes habits a writer can adopt and none of it describes what happens to the post afterwards. The reader's behaviour is the thing you are actually designing for, and it has a shape you can write against.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable for most drafts. If the post is built chronologically, with context first and the point at the end, then all three landing points are occupied by material the reader cannot use. The post is not badly written in that case. It is well written in an order that suits the writer's memory rather than the reader's minute.

The Three-Stop Scan, and the two zones between the stops

Three places get read and two places do not, and knowing which is which changes where you put your best sentences. The stops are fixed by the interface and by how digits look on a screen, so they do not move with your subject. What you put at each one changes with the job the post is doing.

Two of these are worth arguing with. The dead zone is where most writers put their context, because context feels like the polite thing to supply early, and the exit point is where most writers put their summary, which is the one thing a reader who got that far does not need.

Stop one: the cut nobody can measure for you

Do not build a habit on a character count. Published figures for where LinkedIn truncates a post disagree with each other, and they are all describing a moving target, because the cut falls differently on the mobile app, the desktop web view and a tablet, and it shifts with font size, with interface changes and with tests the platform runs without announcing them. Any number you memorise today is a number about somebody else's device.

What is stable is the shape of the problem. A cut exists, it falls after a couple of lines rather than a couple of paragraphs, and it will land before your conclusion unless you deliberately put the conclusion above it. That is enough to write against without knowing the number, and it points at four moves that survive whatever the cut turns out to be.

1. Make the first sentence a complete claim with a stake in it, so that a reader who stops there has still received something usable rather than an announcement that a story is coming.
2. Put a deliberate line break after that first sentence, so the truncation has a natural place to fall and the visible block ends on a full stop instead of mid clause.
3. Never end the visible block on a colon that promises a list, because the reader can predict the list and prediction is what kills the click.
4. Publish, then screenshot your own post on your own phone and look at where the cut actually fell. That is a measurement of your account on your device, which is the only measurement that applies to you.

Five first-line patterns, judged by what the reader can predict from them.

The pattern that fails most often is the honest one. A writer opens with real context because the post genuinely needs it, and the reader sees a line that could introduce any post on the subject. Context is not wrong, it is just badly placed, and it belongs after the claim it supports rather than before it.

Stop two: a numeral is the only reliable magnet in body text

Write the number as a digit and it will be seen. A numeral has a shape that no lowercase word has, which is why a scanning eye catches on 9 and slides past nine, and it is the only device in plain text that reliably pulls attention into the middle of a post. That makes the numeral line the place to put your evidence, and it makes spelling out numbers a small act of self-sabotage.

Where a number belongs, depending on what it is doing in the post.

Three rules follow from the magnet and they are all about restraint. Put the numeral early in the line rather than at the end, since the eye lands on the line and then reads left to right. Use one numeral per stop, because three numbers in one line reads as a spreadsheet and the eye slides off a spreadsheet. Never publish a percentage without its denominator, since a scanning reader who cannot check the figure will discount everything else in the post rather than ask you about it.

The magnet is also the reason so many posts open with a statistic that nobody can source. The device works, which is exactly why using it on an invented number is expensive. You catch the eye once and lose the reader permanently, and senior audiences are unusually good at recognising a number that has been rounded into meaninglessness. The same trade runs through every format decision, which is the subject of what each format is actually good at, since a document post replaces the numeral magnet with a cover image and moves the whole scan.

Stop three: the last line does two jobs that pull against each other

Before the cut, the last visible line has to make expanding feel worthwhile. After expansion, the true last line has to be the sentence a reader could repeat to a colleague without the post attached. Those two jobs want different sentences, which is why the ending is the hardest position in a short post and the one most writers hand to a slogan.

The repeatability test settles the second job in about fifteen seconds. Read your last line aloud to somebody who has not read the post. If it makes sense on its own and is worth saying, it works. If they ask what you are talking about, the line is a summary, and a summary cannot travel because it needs the thing it summarises. This is also the line that ends up inside a repost with commentary or in a screenshot, so it is the sentence most likely to be read by people who never saw the original.

• Endings that fail the test: a moral addressed to nobody, a request for thoughts, a call to book time, and a restatement of the opening in different words.
• Endings that pass: the question you have genuinely not resolved, the specific detail a reader could repeat, the concession that costs you something, and the number you are watching next quarter.
• The ending nobody uses and probably should: naming the strongest objection to your own post, which invites the argument you want in the comments instead of the agreement you do not need.

Over months, a reader learns the shape of one person's posts, and the ending is the part of that shape they recognise first. It is worth knowing that the recognition attaches to a name rather than to a company, which is the uncomfortable part of who owns the account when the executive leaves.

Mapping five post jobs onto the three stops

The stops are fixed and the contents change with the job. This is the table to keep beside the draft, because most structural mistakes are a mismatch between what the post is for and what got put at stop one.

What belongs at each stop, by the job the post is doing.

The row that surprises people is the argument. Putting the strongest objection at the last line feels like weakening the post, and it does the opposite, because a position that names its own best counter-argument reads as thought through while a position that does not reads as a slogan. It also decides what the comments are about, which is the only editorial control you have over them.

The failure row has a trap in it. Most failure posts put the emotion at stop one and the specifics in the dead zone, which is the wrong way round. What was lost is the claim. How it felt is context, and context has no landing point of its own.

The expansion tax, worked with your own numbers

Every word below the cut is behind a click, and the click is a tax on your argument. Work out what that tax costs before deciding where the conclusion goes, because the calculation is simple and it usually reverses the instinct to save the good part for the end.

Assume the post is served into 4,000 feeds and that 1 reader in 5 expands it. Both are assumptions, and your own analytics will give you a better expansion rate than any published figure will, because the rate depends on your audience and your subject rather than on the platform. On those assumptions, 3,200 people see only the visible block. If the conclusion sits at the bottom, the post delivered nothing usable to 80% of the people it reached, and it delivered a wind-up instead.

Now reverse it. Put the conclusion at stop one and those same 3,200 people receive the whole point in two lines, while the 800 who expand get the reasoning. Nothing was lost from the second group, because the reasoning is what they came for, and the first group stopped being a rounding error.

There is an honest counter-argument and it deserves stating. Front-loading the conclusion probably reduces expansions, and expansions plausibly feed distribution, so you may be trading measured reach for delivered usefulness. Nobody outside the platform can settle that with published data, and anybody who tells you the exact size of the effect is guessing. So decide it by intent instead. If the post exists to be understood, the conclusion goes at stop one. If it exists to be argued with, the tension goes at stop one and the conclusion goes at stop three. In both cases the visible block has to be complete in itself.

One caution about measuring this. Post analytics report a click count, and what has counted as a click has varied between rollouts, since a click can be an expansion, a name, an image or a link. Treat it as an upper bound on expansions rather than as a count of them, and compare it against your own past posts rather than against anybody else's numbers.

The same post, restructured: a before and after

The restructure moves three sentences and deletes almost nothing. The composite below is an illustration written for this article, and the before version is not badly written, it is written in the order the writer remembers the events rather than the order the reader needs them.

One post, ordered chronologically and then ordered for the scan.

Read the after column as a reader who never expands. Two lines give a result, a method and a cost, which is a complete piece of information that somebody could act on. The before column gives that reader a date and a company, and then charges them a click for the rest.

If the honest answer to the last check is that the visible block cannot carry anything useful, the post is the wrong length for the point it is making. That is a decision to take before the first sentence rather than after the last one, and it is covered in matching the length to the job.