The lead is the most important part of your article. It seizes your reader’s attention, pulling them deeper and deeper into the depths of your story. Writing a good lead can be very difficult. If you put too much information in your, you can make the story difficult to comprehend. Too little information can be dull and turn your reader away.
The key to a good lead is emphasizing the unusual. News is happening all around us and the audience can read it in many different papers. You have to pick out the most unusual piece of information about the story you are writing and use that to set your story apart from the rest.
Every part of your story has some essential components to it. These essentials become more important in the lead. The lead must be written by keeping an impartial opinion. If your thoughts and feelings begin to show in your lead, your entire story is going to be biased. It is also very important that you keep your audience in mind. If you are writing for a high school paper, you are going to use different language and topics than if you were writing for a health journal.
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I was suprised to find how many leads in The Star Tribune kind of state an opinion without meaning to. Also, there leads are very short and are sometimes seperated from the actual story by a bullet, and placed right under the headline.
ReplyDeleteAll very true points. But when you talk about using the most unusual piece of information about the story, you forget one thing. All the other papers know the same unusual information you do. So on top of emphasizing it, you also have to make it unique, differentiate it from the other papers' leads. And you can't just use the strangest part of it, you still have to keep in mind what the overall story is about and summarize it.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on how your thoughts and opinions in a lead can immediately make the lead biased. I too often am tempted to put my thoughts and my opinions in writing, that is a habit I will need to kick.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think that putting in our opinion closes our minds to all aspects and assumptions of the lead as well.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you said in the beginning. There seems to be a fine line between stating too much information, and not enough. I think that's one of the hardest parts of lead is to find that line and have enough words and description that it draws the reader in.
ReplyDeleteI agree it is important to keep your audience in your mind. What if your audience is the whole nation? If so many different kinds of people read your work, you must write simply and clearly so a whole range of people can understand you.
ReplyDeleteYou teach me better than the book. My favorite part about leads is the unusual; that's exactly what pulls me in. It's also good to keep that balance of information... not too much and not too little.
ReplyDeleteI learned right away about how important the lead is for the entire story. It's almost like window dressing, you have to make it attractive for the reader to check the rest out.
ReplyDeleteGrade: 9.5/10
ReplyDeleteMistakes:
• Missing the word lead in sentence four