Blogwriter benefits from composition skills
Good blogtext composition would appear to lead from the same physiological aspects that govern pictorial composition rules.
When eyes are identifying a picture, they're moving quickly in saccades between the focal points to find a context for the picture. This is where the pictorial composition rules derive from. Well-composed pictures provide the watcher a good context to understand the details in the picture. The details are studied only after the context has been recognized.
You may have heard that people are coming more superficial. They do not bother to read anything without an apparent reward. There's huge amount of content competing for your attention so it makes sense right? No. An article that doesn't communicate its context is badly understood because human language is naturally ambiguous. The context is required for understanding the text.
It is possible that modern search engines already recognize some context in the text. So the clear context in your text likely matters to whether someone ends up to your website or not in the first place. In a world where you could watch lolcat videos rest of your life and where every muck can publish an article, it depends on composition whether a blogpost is useful for anyone. People just have to ignore information they cannot identify in 1.5 seconds and you shouldn't blame them for that.
Just understanding that composition is there for providing context helped me out at improving my blogwriting. I was already aware of inverted pyramid metaphor but wouldn't use it effectively. I think the analogy to painting is more useful than that.
I believe a good clue of getting it right is the sustained eye contact. In optimal case the title should not attract people who do not want to read your text, and the text should provide enough context for the rest to read through. Therefore you should get average reads that match the content length if you get your composition correct.
Links
I realised how composition could work in blogging by reading about the pictorial composition from the gutenberg project books:
- Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures by Henry Rankin Poore
- Composition by Arthur Wesley Dow