You don’t always need to begin at the beginning.

We’ve been writing a few blog posts about how to overcome COVID-induced challenges for a client. Each blog post identifies a specific problem and offers solutions for it. In the first few blog posts, we led with the impact of the pandemic and how many are suffering. After a handful of these ledes, it got repetitive. This is exactly the kind of repetition that’s unimaginative and boring. Nobody needs to be told again and again that we are in the middle of ‘unprecedented times’, right?

It is in this process that I realised that content writers have a tendency to begin at the beginning. “Technology is everywhere”, “AI is changing the world” — that kinda thing. You don’t need to.

Most often, your readers know these things. Unless the beginning is either unknown or contested, you can skip it. Unless the ‘context’ is something completely unfamiliar to the reader, move on. Get to the point. As soon as you possibly can.