Use narrative structure for long-form content

Narrative structure is common in reports, books and technical writing. It generally works better for long-form content than it does for digital content in HTML. This structure is used with some success in long-form blogs.

Narrative structure starts with general statements about the topic. The middle explains or discusses new ideas. The conclusion summarises the main ideas and makes recommendations.

This structure can cause people to miss important ideas:

• The main points are not easy to find.
• People usually need to read from beginning to end to understand the context, even if there is only one main thing they need from the content.

To help users, you can summarise the main findings in the introduction.

Write a beginning, middle and end

Narrative structure has:

• a beginning – the introduction
• a middle – the arguments, discussions and explanations
• an end – conclusion or recommendations.

Signpost each part with headings.

Academic writing also uses this structure. It starts with an introduction, followed by the methods, a discussion and conclusion.

An abstract summarises the article in many academic journals. People tend to read the abstract and the conclusion of a research paper first, before they decide if they want to read the whole paper.