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Hey—It's Tim. 

TL:DR reward the reader at every step.

The Skim Ladder

Most pages try to reward the reader only when they get to the end.
Great pages reward the first glance.
And every glance after that.

We can use the visual design to do most of the work for you.

I’m rebuilding my workflow around micro-payouts: heads that resolve tension, first lines that stand alone, bold that changes copy-pasta behavior.

As part of the next wave of Penfriend features, we’re dropping a skimmability check.

In essence it scores this idea.

If no skim, then no read.

The OG’s among you will recognise that from one of my best LinkedIn carousels of all time.

The premise is this. If your content isn’t skimmable, people will not read it.

You can go even further than this.

Every interaction a reader has with your content need to be rewarded, to invite them to continue interacting.

Open a loop, reward the reader upon closing it.

Every open loop needs to be rewarded upon closing it.

Conceptually it looks like this.

It starts when the user opens the loop by making a search.
I close and reward the loop by having a great title.

They open a loop by clicking the title, landing on and skimming the page.
I close and reward the loop by having clear headings, easy to read ToC, answering their search intent as soon as possible upon landing.

They open a loop by scrolling around the blog.
I close and reward the loop by having benefit lead headings, and a "what you're gonna get in this section" under the headings. each loop is closed and rewarded to get pull the user in more and more and more.

How to open and close loops with your formatting

Treat every element like UI.

• Heads ladder, don’t label. Each subhead should answer the question the line above asked. Old way → new way. Problem → clean promise.

• First lines carry their own weight. If line one of a section can’t live as a pull quote, the paragraph isn’t ready.

• Whitespace buys attention. One idea per block. Let the eye rest between rewards.

• Bold with a job. Highlight the clause you want screenshotted, not the whole sentence.

• Parallelism sticks. Match length and rhythm across bullets so the eye glides.

• Lists resolve with payoff. Close with “Do this → you get X.”

• Captions teach, don’t point. If the image says “laptop,” the caption must say “why it matters.”

The quickie

• Rewrite one subhead into a sharp contrast.

• Tighten every section’s first line to a screenshot-ready sentence.

• Strip any bold that doesn’t change what a reader would copy.

• Scroll once reading only heads, bold, quotes, and captions. If the story still clicks, you’ve earned the deep read.

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "Skim Reaper" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. The skimmability check is gonna live inside the VIBE check.
I’m thinking about releasing it as a free tool. Would you want that?

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.