20 Absurd Costumes To Fill Your Cold Heart With Joy

A good online writer will use an introductory paragraph like this one to give readers a brief overview of what the attached article is about in an entertaining fashion. This encourages "click throughs" to the main text, and ensures that the article gets as many pageviews (and therefore generates as much advertising revenue) as possible.

It should be obvious that the text you are reading right now is an example of an extremely poor introductory paragraph. It is overlong, plainly written (yet not elegantly so), contains little to no useful information, and fails to make even the slightest attempt at capturing the interest of someone who may have stumbled across it accidentally. I suppose I could try to counteract some of this by begging you to continue reading ("Please, please, please, just scroll through and take a look! I've spent oh so much time and effort on this highly entertaining piece, it'd be a shame if you passed it up!"), but this is impossible, as it is not in my nature to lie.

If I wanted to I could backtrack, here, at the very last second, by cramming in some kind of half-assed segue linking this intro to the content below, but I think I'd derive far more satisfaction out of abruptly ending this sentence after implying that I was about to do so, so let's find out.*