1/4/1/1 Why the 1/4/1/1 structure works so well is because now your single-sentence conclusion packs two punches instead of one. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. This fourth sentence rounds out your argument. And this fifth sentence speaks to the emotional benefit of the reader. This sixth sentence is your conclusion. And this seventh sentence is why that conclusion matters so much. If you notice, the only difference between the 1/3/1 structure and 1/4/1/1 is rhythm. One more sentence doesn’t really change the content of the introduction. But the way the sentences are separated elicits a different response in the reader. The 1/3/1 structure feels strong, but 1/4/1/1 feels stronger, and even more opinionated — there are two punchlines instead of one. In fact, just by moving a single sentence up or down in any of these paragraphs can dramatically change the rhythm of your introduction. Here’s an example of the 1/4/1/1 structure from my article, “6 Important Life Lessons You Can Only Learn Through Failure.” Nobody learns the hard lessons in life without some element of failure. When we let someone down, we learn why. When we fall short of our own expectations, we become aware of our growth edge. When we crumble under pressure, we become attuned to our weaknesses. There is a “lesson” inside each and every defeat — and those who ultimately reach their goals see these moments as valuable opportunities, not punishments. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make the learning process any less painful. There are some lessons in life you just can’t learn without falling down, scraping both knees, and getting back up again. Like the other structures above, you can elongate your introduction by adding a bit more text in the first major paragraph. 1/5/1/1 works, and so does 1/6/1/1. But once you start getting up

1/3/1 The 1/3/1 structure is the best place to start. In 1/3/1, you have one strong opening sentence, three description sentences, and then one conclusion sentence. Visually, this is a powerful way to tell the reader you aren’t going to make them suffer through big blocks of text, and that you have their best interests in mind. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this fourth sentence rounds out your argument, guiding the reader toward your conclusion. This fifth sentence is your strong conclusion. Now, just so you can understand why this technique is so powerful, not just from a written perspective but from a visual perspective, look at those same five sentences all clumped together. This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this fourth sentence rounds out your argument, guiding the reader toward your conclusion. This fifth sentence is your strong conclusion. If you clicked on an article and were immediately confronted with a five-sentence paragraph, you would feel (viscerally in your body) the weight of what you were about to read.

The 1/5/1 structure is the same as the 1/3/1 structure, just with more room for description and clarification in the middle. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. This fourth sentence builds on that credibility or description, giving added context or new information. This fifth sentence explains to the reader why you’re telling them what you’re telling them. And this sixth sentence drives home the point. This seventh sentence is your strong conclusion. You want to use the 1/5/1 structure when your opener would benefit from additional context, or you want to tell a story that requires an extra sentence or two for clarification.

For articles that have three or less Main Points, you are going to want to use a structure that doesn’t cut your explanations too short. The 1/2/5/3/1 structure is a good framework to use when thinking about how to make a solid argument for whatever it is you’re writing about, without getting “lost in the sauce” and rambling on and on. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. And this third sentence is why the reader should care. This fourth sentence starts to expand on the point. This fifth sentence is a story, or some sort of credible piece of insight. This sixth sentence builds on that story or insight and tells the reader something they maybe didn’t know. This seventh sentence is a small conclusion. And this eighth sentence is why that conclusion matters. This ninth sentence recaps what you just told the reader. This tenth sentence reinforces the argument you’re making with an additional tidbit or insight. And this eleventh sentence drives the point home. This twelfth sentence reminds the reader of the important takeaway.

Here’s an example of the 1/3/1 + 1/3/1 structure from my article, “8 Soft Skills You Need To Work At A High-Growth Startup.” It takes a certain type of personality to want to work at a startup — and the crucial qualities of startup employees you decide to hire. When I was 26 years old, one of my closest friends and I decided we were going to start a company. He was still in the process of finishing his MBA. I had recently taken the leap from my job as a copywriter working in advertising. And every few weeks he would fly to Chicago (where I was based), or I would fly to Atlanta (where he was based), and we’d trade off sleeping on each other’s couches while brainstorming what our first step was going to be. We called it Digital Press. I’ll never forget the day we decided to make our first hire. He was a freelance writer recommended to me by a friend — and we were in the market to start hiring writers and editors (to replace the jobs my co-founder, Drew, and I were performing ourselves). We asked him to meet us at Soho House in Chicago, ordered a bottle of red wine to share, and “interviewed” him by the pool on the roof. He was a fiction writer with a passion for fantasy and sci-fi (not business writing, which was what we needed), and we were young and inexperienced just hoping someone would trust us enough to follow our vision. We hired him — and fired him two months later. The last thing I want to point out here is that you can actually make the 1/3/1 + 1/3/1 structure move even faster by combining the last sentence of the first section, and the first sentence of the second section, into one singular subhead. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this fourth sentence rounds out your argument. This fifth sentence is both your conclusion and the first sentence of your second section. And this s

1/3/2/1 & 1/5/2/1 The basic structures of online writing are 1/3/1 and 1/5/1. Once you learn these, you can then start to play with rhythm a bit more and elongate your introductions. I cannot stress enough how much you do not want to elongate your writing by cramming sentence after sentence into one paragraph. Online writing benefits from clearly separated thoughts and statements, which is why I recommend using variations of the 1/3/1 and 1/5/1 structure if you need the extra space. Remember: you want to optimize for speed and Rate of Revelation. Anything that isn’t absolutely necessary, delete it. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this fourth sentence rounds out your argument, guiding the reader toward your conclusion. This fifth sentence is your strong conclusion. And this sixth sentence is expanding on why you’re making such a strong conclusion. This seventh sentence is what you’re going to talk about next.

A “trick” for making a long introduction seem short is by repeating the first 1/3/1 structure over again, connecting them with a subhead. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this fourth sentence rounds out your argument. This fifth sentence is your conclusion. Now, here’s a new first sentence as a second opener. And this second sentence clarifies your second opener. This third sentence reinforces the new point you’re making — with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this fourth sentence rounds out the second point of your argument. This fifth sentence is the big conclusion of your introduction. Now, unless you knew what to look for here, you might read a piece structured this way and think, “Well that’s just a long introduction.” But there’s a lot happening beneath the surface that makes an introduction like this work — specifically how it moves the reader quickly down the page. The other reason why repeating the 1/3/1 structure works so well is because it forces you, the writer, to be conscious and clear about what you’re trying to accomplish in each section. Within the first five sentences of the piece, what are you trying to say? What’s the one singular point you’re trying to drive home? What’s this story really about? And then, again in the second 1/3/1 section, what’s the new point you’re looking to drive home? Why is this also important to the reader? Does it really warrant having its own section? Thinking in “chunks” like this is how you make your writing more potent.

1 + Subhead And finally, if you want to just get straight to the point, why waste any time? One sentence is all you need in order to frame the piece — before immediately hitting the reader with the first milestone and subhead. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is what the whole piece is about. And this first subhead is what we’re going to dig into right here, right now. I don’t recommend this technique for everything you write, but as a way to change things up, it can be a powerful mechanism for turning your Rate of Revelation knob to level 10. Here’s an example of the 1 + Subhead structure from my article, “I Used To Have Social Anxiety. These 4 Mental Shifts Made Me Confident.” Most people see confidence as something you’re born with — you either have it or you don’t. But the truth is, confidence is just like any other personality trait. If you want to be more patient, you have to practice patience. If you want to be more compassionate, you have to practice compassion. If you want to be more thoughtful, you have to practice doing things intentionally. And if you want to be confident, well then, you simply have to practice being confident.

For example, here’s an excerpt from my article, “How Do Some People Succeed So Quickly? They Approach Life Like This.” Every single moment, of every single day, you are “practicing” something. If you don’t floss in the morning, you’re practicing not-flossing. If you choose to eat quinoa and veggies instead of Frosted Flakes, you’re practicing eating for fuel instead of eating for enjoyment. If you yell at your significant other, you’re practicing a lack of self-control. If you watch TV instead of working on your book, you’re practicing postponing your dream of becoming a novelist. The moment you start to see the world this way, you start to realize that every single moment, of every single day, you are practicing something. And how aware you are of whatever it is you’re practicing dictates how consciously (or unconsciously) you move toward or away from where it is you actually want to be: whether that’s a destination, a physical place, or an emotional state. Here, I am combining the 1/1/1/1 structure with repetition to give a reader plenty of actionable examples without forcing them to read through paragraphs of prose. I’m only giving them what they absolutely need — and then once I’ve given them a handful of examples, I follow up with a longer, more descriptive paragraph (alternating rhythms).

First, you never want to have three or more long paragraphs one after another. That style of writing has been dead for years, and anyone writing that way on the internet is clinging to a way things were but no longer are. Second, if you are going to have long paragraphs one after another, you want to find ways to change up their internal rhythm so they don’t feel or sound exactly the same. One way of doing this is by using punctuation. Have one paragraph with a lot of short, strong sentences. Have the next paragraph be one long, winding sentence. This is what makes them seem “different.” Lastly, notice how before and after both long paragraphs in the above excerpt there are single, declarative sentences. This is very intentional. Again, you want to subtly tell the reader, “I’m going to tell you a quick story — this will only take a second,” before giving them their next mile marker. There’s something about reading a single sentence after a long paragraph that gives a reader the same feeling a listener gets hearing a chord resolve on the piano. Let your chords resolve.

The real strategy here is to make the reader feel like they’ve stepped into the middle of a piece by the time they’ve finished reading the very first sentence. There’s something jarring (in a good way) about seeing the second sentence of an article bolded as a subhead. It tells the reader, “We’re already getting to the good part,” encouraging them to keep reading.

The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third sentence, it’s equally dead.

The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead.

The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail. They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.