Don't leave your reader hanging.
If you like the book Cryptonomicon, you know how engaging it can be when a story is told in snippets that come together at the end.
The book jumps around between narratives, one in World War II and one closer to the present. There's overlap between the storylines that help make the time travel from one chapter to the next less jarring and more normal. It may jump around, but it is not quite disjointed.
Neal Stephenson, the author, gives you information in dribs and drabs. He's taking you on a journey, and he knows it. He draws you in, keeps you engaged, and expects you to read through to the end.
And boy is that end far away. The paperback I read a couple years ago is over 1,100 pages. And it's crammed full of stuff, from Van Eck phreaking to cannibals to cryptosystems to Douglas MacArthur.
Still, it works. It's not perfect, but it works.
You can't count on your readers to stick with it, though, particularly in the policy world.
That has in part to do with the fact that reading for pleasure and reading for information/analysis are different things in many ways. They aren't mutually exclusive—something that's pleasurable can also be informative and something informative is ideally pleasurable to read, and so on. But the reader approaches the material differently.
By and large, when reading for pleasure, I'm usually ready to go along for the ride. When reading for information/analysis, I want the bottom line.
This is of course compounded by the fact that we're all overwhelmed with stuff these days.
I remember a piece in the New York Times a few years ago that talked about the amount of information Americans consume. I poked around and found it again—turns out the article is from 2009. So over five years ago, Americans were consuming 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information a day. I haven't looked at the full study yet. And I won't because now I need to get back to the point.
All this means that when you're writing to provide information or analysis, you want something that, as a good friend always says, breaks through the noise—that is engaging and a pleasure to read but still makes a case quickly and clearly. You don't want to wait until the end for everything to come together. You want to make sure the reader has at least a sense at the outset of where you're going to take him or her. You want to BLUF—put your bottom line up front.
Achieving that can be as colorful or as direct or as veiled as you'd like. If you're delivering key judgments to a decisionmaker, you probably want to BLUF directly, maybe even in bullet points (gasp!). If you're writing a 3,000-word piece aiming to raise awareness and inform your audience about an issue, you might want a more narrative style. If you're opening a research paper, you have more space and can ease into key points in the introduction—but even then it's good to have an executive summary of some sort that cuts right to the chase.
The bottom line is you don't want to be like Neal Stephenson and make your reader wait until the end for it all to come together (she says as she violates her own rule). And in the end, even he couldn't quite tie together all the threads he had unraveled. But more on that another day.