How's Your Rate of Revelation?

I’d never heard of “rate of revelation” until June 2023.

Never learned it in grade school, or college, or grad school. It never came up in the countless essays and writing assignments given through all those classes and years.

And now I can’t stop thinking about it.

The Rate of Information

Rate of revelation is a simple idea: it’s just the rate at which you convey necessary information to the reader.

And now that I’ve learned about it I’m looking around to see it everywhere. Yesterday my 11 y/o son was telling me this interminable story that made my brain shrivel up like a SpongeBob meme. I felt twitchy with “what’s the point?” and I realized it was because he was giving me oodles of words—with no revelations. None. I was hungry for a why.

Your readers are hungry for a why—especially with online writing.

It’s different with a full-length book. Whether you’re reading nonfiction or the latest immersive fantasy tome from Brandon Sanderson, your being there is a tacit agreement to a slower rate of revelation. You’re there because you’re willing to invest more time in the reading (to a point).

But online writing? Not so much.

Here, we need to move readers through information quickly, to make it skimmable. Writing almost needs to broadcast that it offers a high rate of revelation in order to get readers to click—even if readers don’t realize that’s what’s happening.

Rate of Revelation and Your Big Idea

The point isn’t to shorten your writing in order to speed up your rate of revelation, to accelerate things in a way that feels rushed. The point is to structure your writing in a way that pays attention to the value drip for your reader.

Because good writing is about the reader.

If you think of rate of revelation (ROR) as a shape, three simple versions could look like this:

On the left, you have a ROR that accelerates from the beginning of a piece of writing to the end. In the middle, your rate hits hard early and then tapers. And at the right, you have a rate that stays consistent.

Now, it’s unlikely any piece of writing would have a ROR that you could picture this cleanly, but the aim isn’t to match a certain shape. It’s to think about your ROR in terms of a structure that gets your reader to your Big Idea:

• As you outline your writing, is your ROR paced well?

• Is there enough revelation early to keep readers going?

• Does one section feel too heavy with revelation, or too light?

• Do the revelations lead to or reinforce your Big Idea?

Sometimes outlining can cause us to lose sight of our Big Idea: we get too in the weeds of certain facts, details, or key points.

But keeping ROR in mind as we outline means we can’t lose sight of our Big Idea, because we’re always keeping an eye on the pace at which we get there.

Keep Readers Hungry—and Satisfied

This feels like a Mr. Miyagi thing to say, but your job is to keep readers hungry, and satisfied.

Too hungry and maybe they worry the rest of the article won’t satisfy them. The move on to something else, or get distracted. But too satisfied, and they might feel like they’ve already gotten the goods and so they stop reading early.

Knowing about the rate of revelation has me reflecting on past writing that underperformed, and wondering if the problem was my ROR.

We tend to think our topic’s to blame, or that maybe our Big Idea didn’t land with readers. But maybe the problem is really the rate of revelation, which isn’t a writing problem so much as a structural one.

Time to go build thinking about this into my outline process.

🧠 and ❤️

Lauren