Every time I reread my blog posts, the same thought comes to my mind – “man, I buried the lead again”.
I learned about leads from “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Chip and Dan Heath. It is a short book, but one that influenced me deeply. Every blogger out there should read it.
“Burying a lead“, in the jargon of journalists means boring the reader before getting to the juicy part. A “lead” or “lede” is the first sentence of the story.
In the book, there’s an anecdote about a journalism teacher giving his students an assignment:
” … They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Amnong the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown. ”
Apparently, most students produced a lead that lumped all these facts into a single sentence. The teacher read all the submissions and then announced:
“The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday’ ”
I am having a huge problem with writing in “inverted pyramid” style. The juicy parts of my posts are usually at the bottom.
Think about it, most blog readers, especially the ones that matter suffer from add, and often do not get to the bottom of the article. This means they won’t link to it, won’t digg it.
I am trying to improve, but writing is a difficult art to master. I just wish I took more writing classes.
