An effective article is an article that achieves its goal. Now, that goal can be anything: To entertain, inform, or persuade someone to act.

The reason every piece of writing needs a purpose is that it’s difficult to get someone’s attention. If a reader clicks your article (which is already rare), you have barely 15 seconds to hold their attention.

You can say the same thing about emails or text messages. Just look at how you respond to any written form of communication.

When an email doesn’t instantly grab your attention, you probably won’t even open it, right? Same thing with everything else on the internet. When you write effective texts, you’re always aware of the fact that most people will probably never even start reading your stuff.

But that doesn’t mean effective writing is only about grabbing people’s attention. If that were the case, you could only write outrageous headlines. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is to grab someone’s attention and hold it.