The first sentence of every paragraph should be a BLUF. Readers can see the point right away without having to read through the entire paragraph. Readers don’t need to piece together the meaning themselves.
Most people write in the inverse—they put the summary of the paragraph in the last sentence or muddled somewhere in the middle (or not at all!).
How do you do it?
Paragraphs should read like a miniature recipe or categorized list. Take the most important idea in the paragraph and put it first. Follow with supporting sentences that are inductive (rather than deductive).
You can see this style in practice by deconstructing this page. If you take the first sentence of each paragraph it should still be understandable—albeit in lower fidelity. If you take each paragraph and turned it into a bulleted list, the category of supporting sentences should all have the same subject.
See also:
- The Minto Pyramid Principle covers this and how to structure writing so it makes sense overall
- This is another way of saying always give the summarizing idea first whether it’s a paragraph or the structure of an essay