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At school, I was taught that the correct way to write is...
...so that at the beginning people have an idea about what will be said (so they can focus on the important parts instead of tangents), and at the end they can review and remember the important points.
There is a slightly modified version for teachers, where as an introduction you ask motivating questions, such as "how could we do X?", and then you proceed by a lesson that includes how to do X.
However, out of school, when I was writing short stories, I was told that this is the part of school education that is most important to unlearn for writers. You do not write stories like this, because they will be super boring -- the introduction will contain unnecessary spoilers, and the conclusion will just repeat what you already know if you paid any attention to the story. The lesson is that text written with a different purpose requires different structure.
Instead, here is what works for stories:
tl;dr -- how you write should reflect your expectations why and how people will read your text; for example textbook vs fiction, but also tutorial vs reference, etc.
About the same for me. But I pictured you older than my 20s target group. No?
Yep. Let them know where you're going, so they can more easily follow along. In this case, the payoff is clear - you will learn how to do X. More generally, we're going to answer the question we asked.
Yes. Write to the purpose you want to achieve. Keep in mind the purposes of your readers to achieve your purpose.
In keeping with the title, consider the incentives of all parties when writing.
Correct; I'm 40 now.
I'm 51.
I think you should be old enough to have been an adult when The Change occurred. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or something.
By my recollection, once upon a time, I'm thinking maybe 20 years ago, journalists used to write articles that articulated a point. They made a case for something. There was some presentation of evidence. Arguments. Arguments and evidence arrayed to make a point.
At least 10 years ago, I'm not sure when, I started seeing recognizable points being replaced by vomitous streams of consciousness, or article by anecdote. The blah blah blah continues until i stop reading, or gouge my eyes out.
Perhaps I've overstated the change a bit, but I think there has been a definite shift in the direction indicated. Do you perceive anything of the sort?
That might be related to the process of news organizations (like newspapers and magazines) going out of business.
They used to make money. Some of that money was used to pay more-or-less professional journalists to write more-or-less competent articles and stories. Large papers maintained their own foreign bureaus, for example, and had their own man-on-the-spot who lived in that country and didn't just fly in for a few hours to do a quickie reportage in front of the issue du jour.
For a fresh example consider a remarkably candid description of how Ben Rhodes, a mid-level White House official, was able to effectively manipulate the media coverage of the Iran nuclear deal. He is quite open about it:
As you have noticed, things changed. There is no money to pay professional journalists (or professional news photographers) any more. They've been replaced by "citizen journalists" and bloggers -- see HuffPo for where the whole thing goes.
Is it horrible and terrible and the end of the world? Well, as usual it depends :-) You gain some, you lose some. From my point of view you lose effortless access to competent summaries of what's happening. You gain somewhat effortful access (you need to do a LOT of filtering) to multiple and very different points of view. I count it as a net loss for issues I care little about and a net gain for issues I care more about. YMMV, of course.
I get that with the proliferation of outlets, and free media, compensation and quality have gone down.
But I'm not commenting on quality of the writing as much as the structure of what is written. The structures have changed away from the communication of a reasoned argument marshaling facts to support a point.
That structure is a major element of the "quality of writing".
Plus, of course, the incentives changed somewhat. If you are going out of business, clicks/eyeballs become more important than the reputation of a respectable publication.
Ok, I think I'm catching on.
It's not really that people were trained differently. (May or may not be). Instead, market conditions have changed, and therefore what the market produces has changed.
Evidence and argument takes time. Stories and stream of consciousness can be churned out. Whether that trade off is better to survive in current conditions is dependent on the particulars of the conditions.
I can see an argument that with the barriers to entry in publishing removed, the proliferation of outlets means fewer eyeballs for each. In that environment, revenue goes down.
Also, the number of people who want a reasoned and evidenced article is limited. Their tastes were probably overly accommodated in the past, because of the meritocratic competition for the few chairs at the table left smart, talented people at the table making decisions. With the click democracy and proliferation of outlets, the mass who have relatively little interest in reason and evidence will have more outlets more suited to their tastes.
See another current story on the fall of Salon which goes into some details about how quality first slipped and then went into free fall. Notable quote:
When you hire as cheap people as possible, and make them write every day as many articles as possible, you get neither reasonable jurnalists nor reasonable article structure.
My country is far behind the most current wave of clickbait journalism, but things have been reliably going downhill for years. I know a person who worked for one of the most respected newspapers in the country. Their job description was like this: "at morning, the boss gave them a random topic; till 4pm they had to write two long articles for the paper version, and two more short articles for the web version". Every day way like this; after a year most people were fired because they were burned out, and they were replaced by fresh ones. Mind you, this was one of the serious newspapers.
Now imagine yourself, that you get a task to write four articles about a topic you know nothing about. What can you do? Use google to get some background, then pick up the phone and call a few random people, ask them some questions, and write as fast as you can. Most people will refuse to answer the phone because they already have experience of being misrepresented by media. However, there are a few people who are willing to give you a simplistic opinion on any topic; any experienced journalist has a list of them, because when everything else fails and your boss is screaming at you, these people can save your day. So, you get some background by reading articles in English about the topic (yeah, we are stealing shamelessly), you invent a probable story, then you fish for some quotes, and then you hurry writing the text because you barely have time. Four stories a day, about a topic you previously never heard about.
When I write blog articles, I usually spend much more time writing an article than a journalist could afford.
You and Lumifer pointed out the economic aspects, by which I see that:
Rest of my reply to Lumifer: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nnq/when_considering_incentives_consider_the/dbch