A hook is fine to motivate the science, but you've got to be careful with that. I've put down many science books from scientists whose work I really like - most recently Nowak Super Cooperators - because it is all 'human interest' and no science. I don't need to hear about what the author had for breakfast on the day that he went to visit a collaborator. If I want to read about breakfast, I'll read Proust. When I find myself skimming through it looking for science, that's when I put the book down.
Yes, I definitely agree it can all go too far, which is hopefully where an editor can step in - though of course it's a matter of taste where to draw the line, and some authors might be attached to their particular purple prose!
Fascinating to see "Malcolms" given a name! I'd sort of figured this out organically from my newsletter. Most of my posts now start with some sort of anecdote, often only tangentially related to the main argument I want to make. And I always make sure I've got a grabby opening line. And I absolutely don't think there's anything wrong with writing this way - as you're getting more eyeballs on what you're ultimately trying to say. My view now is basically unless I can see the headline/hook I won't bother writing the piece, as no one will read it.
I think you're probably coming at it from more of a journalistic angle, so it probably comes more naturally to you - like I say I don't mind it, it just took me a while to figure out that it was a thing, and that consciously deciding to do it could (a lot of the time) be a good idea.
Fascinating! I also went viral this weekend (though on a couple of orders of magnitude lower scale than you, but still large for me). The oddity was that in my case it was a post I'd first written last July, with just a few hundred views, but a reshare last weekend suddenly went viral, with over half a million views on X and well over 10,000 of the piece itself. It's a weird feeling.
It feels there is an element of both quality and serendipity - I'm sure in your case more of the first!
Yes, I saw and enjoyed that post. It is definitely odd how that happens. In fact, I wrote something about it in the book, in the context of the #NuggsForCarter thing (there was no particular logic why that should be the particular post that hit 3m RTs or whatever it was). But probably using a Malcolm about going viral as an illustration was too self-referential for first thing this morning!
Ohhh, I didn’t know they were called ‘Malcolms’- that’s brilliant. I first noticed a version of this form decades ago with Sunday broadsheet ‘big political story of the week’ pieces - they always opened with something that plopped you right into the context in a way that initially felt a bit jarring (‘When Sir Boseley Snoddington made his way into the Chancellor’s office on Tuesday morning, he didn’t know he was about to be briefed on a policy that would astonish the UK’s financial sector and cause a disastrous run on the pound.’) It’s fascinating how these forms become popularised/legible, then common, then a bit tired, and then out of fashion altogether (eventually). (I’m not criticising - I do it myself all the time.) Congrats on virality!
I think the classic one is American recipes - there's some viral tweet somewhere about how you can't describe how to cook anything without first putting in 400 words about how this is what your grandmother used to cook in her tiny house upstate and how it made you feel when you were seven, but this is based on the version you ate when you first visited Europe ...
Sadly, that's just the SEO alogorithms at work. Google rewards sites with higher profiles the longer people stay on them, and the greater length of text allows more SEO words in to broaden the hit rate. This visually over-complicated Verge article does do a good job of showing just how Google ranking forces web pages to lose their individuality (and brevity)... https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization
Urgh I *hate* it in recipes, but then I just am not interested enough in the sociology of food to find any of the anecdotes remotely interesting. I suspect it’s all Nigel Slater’s fault, wanging on about the personal semiology of toast. Just tell me what I’m doing with this onion, Nigel! Which I guess will be some readers’ response to any given Malcolm.
A hook is fine to motivate the science, but you've got to be careful with that. I've put down many science books from scientists whose work I really like - most recently Nowak Super Cooperators - because it is all 'human interest' and no science. I don't need to hear about what the author had for breakfast on the day that he went to visit a collaborator. If I want to read about breakfast, I'll read Proust. When I find myself skimming through it looking for science, that's when I put the book down.
Yes, I definitely agree it can all go too far, which is hopefully where an editor can step in - though of course it's a matter of taste where to draw the line, and some authors might be attached to their particular purple prose!
Fascinating to see "Malcolms" given a name! I'd sort of figured this out organically from my newsletter. Most of my posts now start with some sort of anecdote, often only tangentially related to the main argument I want to make. And I always make sure I've got a grabby opening line. And I absolutely don't think there's anything wrong with writing this way - as you're getting more eyeballs on what you're ultimately trying to say. My view now is basically unless I can see the headline/hook I won't bother writing the piece, as no one will read it.
I think you're probably coming at it from more of a journalistic angle, so it probably comes more naturally to you - like I say I don't mind it, it just took me a while to figure out that it was a thing, and that consciously deciding to do it could (a lot of the time) be a good idea.
Fascinating! I also went viral this weekend (though on a couple of orders of magnitude lower scale than you, but still large for me). The oddity was that in my case it was a post I'd first written last July, with just a few hundred views, but a reshare last weekend suddenly went viral, with over half a million views on X and well over 10,000 of the piece itself. It's a weird feeling.
It feels there is an element of both quality and serendipity - I'm sure in your case more of the first!
Yes, I saw and enjoyed that post. It is definitely odd how that happens. In fact, I wrote something about it in the book, in the context of the #NuggsForCarter thing (there was no particular logic why that should be the particular post that hit 3m RTs or whatever it was). But probably using a Malcolm about going viral as an illustration was too self-referential for first thing this morning!
Ohhh, I didn’t know they were called ‘Malcolms’- that’s brilliant. I first noticed a version of this form decades ago with Sunday broadsheet ‘big political story of the week’ pieces - they always opened with something that plopped you right into the context in a way that initially felt a bit jarring (‘When Sir Boseley Snoddington made his way into the Chancellor’s office on Tuesday morning, he didn’t know he was about to be briefed on a policy that would astonish the UK’s financial sector and cause a disastrous run on the pound.’) It’s fascinating how these forms become popularised/legible, then common, then a bit tired, and then out of fashion altogether (eventually). (I’m not criticising - I do it myself all the time.) Congrats on virality!
I think the classic one is American recipes - there's some viral tweet somewhere about how you can't describe how to cook anything without first putting in 400 words about how this is what your grandmother used to cook in her tiny house upstate and how it made you feel when you were seven, but this is based on the version you ate when you first visited Europe ...
Sadly, that's just the SEO alogorithms at work. Google rewards sites with higher profiles the longer people stay on them, and the greater length of text allows more SEO words in to broaden the hit rate. This visually over-complicated Verge article does do a good job of showing just how Google ranking forces web pages to lose their individuality (and brevity)... https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization
Urgh I *hate* it in recipes, but then I just am not interested enough in the sociology of food to find any of the anecdotes remotely interesting. I suspect it’s all Nigel Slater’s fault, wanging on about the personal semiology of toast. Just tell me what I’m doing with this onion, Nigel! Which I guess will be some readers’ response to any given Malcolm.