Introducing the main idea

Start each article/post with a single phrase that briefly describes the idea being communicated.

I've been reading Dave Pollard's excellent weblog for a little while now and I've noticed that at the beginning of each article he writes "The Idea" followed by a description of what he wants to communicate in the article.

This is a great tool for focussing the contents of an article and it also allows readers to read the full story with the basic idea in mind. It provides a sort of scaffolding for the rest of the article so that additional ideas can glom onto the original one to create a (hopefully) coherent whole.