Inverted pyramid
Conclusion first, detail descending after, so a reader can quit at any point and still walk away with the point.
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What it is
The inverted pyramid orders a piece by descending importance: the conclusion first, then the supporting facts, then the background nobody will reach. It came from wire-service journalism, where an editor cut stories from the bottom to fit the column and the story still had to make sense. The same shape survives on the web for the same reason: readers cut from the bottom too, by leaving.
Reach for it whenever the reader wants an answer rather than an experience: release notes, support articles, incident updates, status emails, executive summaries, API docs. Front-loading also makes a page easier to quote out of context, which may help search snippets and AI answer engines pull the right passage, though both can lift text from anywhere on the page and nobody outside those systems knows how they pick. Write it for the human first. The practical test: delete the last third of your draft. If the piece still answers the question, the order is right.
Gotcha: it is a deliberate suspense killer, so it is wrong for anything whose value is the journey. Case studies, founder stories, and tutorials need tension, sequence, or steps that only work in order. The other confusion: the inverted pyramid is about order of information, not short paragraphs. Chopping a rambling draft into one-line paragraphs makes it look scannable while the point stays buried in the middle.
Ask AI for it
Restructure this piece as an inverted pyramid. Open with a single sentence stating the outcome or answer, follow it with one paragraph covering who it affects and why it matters now, then the supporting detail in descending order of importance, then background and caveats last. Every paragraph must be deletable from the bottom up without breaking the piece. Do not save anything for a conclusion, and do not add a summary at the end.