I'm not suggesting any of this isn't good advice. Yes, blending an introduction seamlessly into your writing will make you a better writer. But you're thinking as a producer of content here.
As a consumer of content, I can't hold myself to the standard of only reading things written by "people who have distinguished themselves at writing." If you're the only person who has written about X, and I'm researching X, I'm going to have to look at your article—at least to tell if I can safely not look at your article without having missed something important.
And good writing is hard: you're basically giving the creative equivalent to the obligatory advice of "eat less and exercise more." Yes, reworking and redrafting to achieve flow in your writing is a "good thing." It's something to strive for. But that doesn't mean that you can expect anyone to follow that advice just because they read a few paragraphs about it online. If they write much, they've likely already given it some thought—and it's a lack of willpower, not a lack of skill, that prevents them from editing their work as much as is necessary to get a result easily consumable by others.
An explicit "executive summary" line is a quick fix. It's something an amateur writer—one who doesn't practice writing as a craft, and has no desire to redraft—can use to make their writing less painful. It's asking much less of people—it's just a sentence, written after the fact, explaining what you just said—so it's probably something people would implement after seeing a conversation about it online and saying "oh, that could work."
Certainly, it's not as readable as good writing. But, for most people, it is more readable than whatever they had before, at much less cost.
(Also, I wouldn't mind if experienced writers included a call-out of some sort as well—not because it helps their prose at all, but rather just because I don't know if someone is an experienced writer until I actually dive into the body text, and by then I've already made my decision whether to read or not. Give me metadata.)
As a consumer of content, I can't hold myself to the standard of only reading things written by "people who have distinguished themselves at writing." If you're the only person who has written about X, and I'm researching X, I'm going to have to look at your article—at least to tell if I can safely not look at your article without having missed something important.
And good writing is hard: you're basically giving the creative equivalent to the obligatory advice of "eat less and exercise more." Yes, reworking and redrafting to achieve flow in your writing is a "good thing." It's something to strive for. But that doesn't mean that you can expect anyone to follow that advice just because they read a few paragraphs about it online. If they write much, they've likely already given it some thought—and it's a lack of willpower, not a lack of skill, that prevents them from editing their work as much as is necessary to get a result easily consumable by others.
An explicit "executive summary" line is a quick fix. It's something an amateur writer—one who doesn't practice writing as a craft, and has no desire to redraft—can use to make their writing less painful. It's asking much less of people—it's just a sentence, written after the fact, explaining what you just said—so it's probably something people would implement after seeing a conversation about it online and saying "oh, that could work."
Certainly, it's not as readable as good writing. But, for most people, it is more readable than whatever they had before, at much less cost.
(Also, I wouldn't mind if experienced writers included a call-out of some sort as well—not because it helps their prose at all, but rather just because I don't know if someone is an experienced writer until I actually dive into the body text, and by then I've already made my decision whether to read or not. Give me metadata.)