To convince a reader or conference attendee that your content is something to pay attention to, try opening strong.
I don't think I'm very good at this, so I loved Maggie Appleton's latest piece. It's full of useful advice:
For your writing to be worth reading, you need to be exploring something of consequence for someone. You have to have some kind of problem that matters.
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Once you know you have a consequential problem for a community and some sense of a solution, you get to play with narrative details. This is the fun storytelling part.
Hidde de Vries (@hdv@front-end.social) is a web enthusiast from Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He currently works on accessibility standards for the Dutch government (views his own) and is in the W3C's AB. Previously, he worked for Mozilla, W3C/WAI, national and local governments, Sanoma Learning and others as a freelancer. Hidde is a public speaker (all 81 talks). In his free time, he works on a coffee table book covering the video conferencing apps of our decade.