Noted with pleasure: NYT tech guy Pogue

David Pogue, the New York Times' technology and personal electronics guru, does a great job writing user-friendly copy about user-hostile material.

Pogue comes across as a real everyman, a friendly geek who's just trying to sort out the quantum-leaping jumble of tech developments for the folks in his audience. His weekly online videos are a hoot -- a homespun contrast to the sleek hip image of the products he reviews.

Here's how Pogue kicked off his latest State of the Art column, about a new movie download service:

If you had to make a master list of all the world’s problems, “limited access to movies” probably wouldn’t appear until Page 273,996.

Truth is, life is teeming with opportunities to see movies: movie theaters, video stores, DVD-by-mail services, TV movie channels, pay-per-view, video-on-demand, Xbox 360, iTunes, Internet downloads, hotel rooms, airplanes and so on.

But according to the team at Vudu, all of those outlets are flawed.

I really like the way Pogue gets into this article. It's a delayed lead, meaning he waits a few paragraphs before getting to the point. Pogue engages the audience right away -- the first two grafs deliver a modest bit of Seinfeld-esque observational humor: Everyone agrees and nods.

The kicker, the third graf, is the one that keeps you reading. Only after that curious sentence does the columnist start telling his story, getting to the who-what-when-where-how-and-sometimes-why three grafs later than most writers would.

Pogue pulls it off in part because of his economy -- he burns off just three sentences. They're all in separate paragraphs, encouraging the reader to move through them quickly. (Paragraph length is a great way of controlling pacing.) The lead wouldn't work if it were packaged in one bulky paragraph.

Pogue almost certainly didn't sit down and select that approach -- he just started typing. It's in his bag of tricks, though, and at some point he learned the lesson I'm offering in this post: Smart, short delayed leads make great audience bait.

Breaking down good writers' content almost always pays off. Give it a try next time you're reading the Times or a writers magazine such as Esquire or Vanity Faire.

(If Vudu, the product, interests you, be sure to check out my blog Downloading Movies 101.)