Is your Single Most Important Thing obvious?

Get your Single Most Important Thing in early. What is the one thing you want people to understand and remember from this thing you're writing?

Tell them fast. Don't bury the lede, as journalists say.

Years ago, I was correcting work by journalism students, who had been given a 'real-time' exercise about an imaginary incident in the English Channel.

Over three hours, they got multiple 'live' updates from the police, the coast guard, shipping companies and so on. And they had to write a news report, updating it as they went.

After some hours of correcting, I was asked by a friend how it was going.

"THE F***ING SHIP SANK," I wailed.

At that point, I had trawled through endless paragraphs of purple prose about the weather and tedious lists of stats about tonnage, not to mention dogged chronological accounts of what had happened.

Hardly anyone kicked off by saying a ship had sunk.

Identify your Single Most Important Thing.
Get it in early.
Repeat it.