How to structure non-fiction writing

17 May

Non-fiction writing is all about structure. The order in which you divulge information not only helps capture your reader, but it will also improve the performance of digital articles.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the tools in your arsenal, but I will touch on this in greater detail soon. For now, we’re going to work on improving non-fiction writing by establishing a rough order you can apply to almost any story to speed up the process.

The five Ws (and How)

What? Who? Where? Why? When? These are the key considerations in non-fiction writing, especially within science communication. Once you’ve crossed off this key information, the next question is: How?

A self-decapitating sea slug has been discovered by researchers at Nara Women’s University studying nudibranch regeneration in Japan. It’s hoped understanding how these animals regrow their entire bodies may yield insights for human medicine, and as a paper published in Current Biology this week reveals, it’s quite the party trick.

This example is based on one of my favourite papers I’ve covered since working at IFLScience. In this opening paragraph we’ve crossed off all of the five Ws, leaving the rest of the article free to explain How the discovery came about.

Frontloading, don’t bury the lede

The most interesting information needs to appear as early as possible in your article (this is why so much effort goes into choosing a good headline, which we’ll cover soon). The headline, deck and image caption are great place to pepper in some editorial flavour before reaching the main body of the article, and then it all comes down to sentence/paragraph structure.

A) Researchers at Nara Women’s University in Japan published a paper in Current Biology this week about a self-decapitating sea slug.

B) A self-decapitating sea slug has been discovered by researchers at Nara Women’s University studying nudibranch regeneration in Japan.

Version A covers a lot of necessary information, but the most exciting part is buried beneath the details that don’t elicit as much interest. Version B gets the spicy stuff out there as soon as possible, and is what’s going to hook your reader and keep them reading.

Every new paragraph of your article from there is an opportunity for them to drop off. So, you want to try and keep up your frontloading until the final paragraph if you’re going to keep down your bounce rate down.