Evil Leads

Arg! Leads are probably the most difficult thing I have had to do this semester in all of my classes combined. I think the reason for this, for me at least, is because I never had prior experience in writing leads. I never learned the rules in high school, let alone even looked at a lead! I wasn’t even aware that there were so many different kinds of leads until I took this class. 

One thing that helped me on this assignment was to remember the who, what , where, when, and why tip. I know that this tip does not work for every lead, but for those that it does work on I found it easy to read the lead, and rearrange the sentence or sentences to answer those who, what, where, when and why questions. Once I rearranged the sentence in that order, I was able to easily remove the fluff and leave the most important information in the lead. I applied this tip to more than half of the leads in the assignments and found it to work quite well.
 

I think a good example of a strong and effective opening paragraph in a magazine article is in Time Magazine in an article about nutrition. The article begins like this:

“For decades, it has been the most vilified nutrient in the American diet. But new science reveals fat isn’t what’s hurting our health. The taste of my childhood was the taste of skim milk. We spread bright yellow margarine on dinner rolls, ate low-fat microwave oatmeal flavored with apples and cinnamon, put nonfat ranch on our salads.”

I like how this paragraph is written because it uses strong visuals to attract the reader and bring them into the story. The way the author describes the butter on certain foods in her childhood memory definitely made my mouth water. If you can attract the reader with the very first sentence, I think you’ve got a great lead.

Editing Mistake:

 

 A friend of mine showed me this News Journal clipping and I found it ironic and hilarious. Clearly there is a "p" missing in postponed. The fact that this headline is about spelling makes this so much funnier.