WRT333
The "Lead" in a Popular Press Article: "...such a progression of sentences..."
Used with assignment 6
My favorite lead...
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
frequently quoted, not sure of origin yet....
The Lead...
William Zinsser's classic guide, On Writing Well, may well be the source of much of the advice that school teachers give their young charges, particularly when it comes to that catchy first paragraph.
The Lead
"The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce [the reader] to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead. Of such a progression of sentences, each tugging the reader forward until [...] safely hooked, a writer constructs that fateful unit: the "lead."
What are we to make of Zinsser's notion of the critical, nearly desperate focus on grabbing and holding on to a reader? The best we are going to end up with is Zinsser's shrugging admission, as his lead continues, "Every article poses a different problem, and the only valid test is: does it work?" So you are mostly on your own, teased by "...I urge you not to count on the reader to stick around. [The reader] is [...] fidgety [and] wants to know—very soon—what's in it for him." [Modified to correct for Zinsser's unfortunate persistent use of the masculine in referring to readers.]
Zinsser uses examples from his own writing for popular magazines (Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and Look); he claims that these may not be the best leads, but "I only know that they work." (He doesn't say how he knows this.)
From "Block that Chickenfurter"
"I've often wondered what goes into a hot dog. Now I know and I wish I didn't."
My trouble began when the Department of Agriculture published the hot dog's ingredients—everything that may legally qualify—because it was asked by the poultry industry to relax the conditions under which the ingredients might also include chicken. In other words, can a chickenfurter find happiness in the land of the frank?
Judging by the 1,066 mainly hostile answers that the Department got when it sent out a questionnaire on this point, the very thought is inthinkable. The public mood was most felicitously caught by the woman who replied: "I don't eat feather meat of no kind."
From "Does He or Doesn't He?"
Until this year I have always wanted to smell as good as the next man. But now the next man wants to smell too good. The boom in male cosmetics is sweeping America at such speed—sales went over half a billion dollars in 1965 alone and are growing fast—that one of the country's most popular entertainers recently refused to tell the name of the scent that he was wearing. Too many other men, he explained, would also start to wear it.
That entertainer's secret would be safe with me. He could tell me the name of his scent tomorrow and I swear I wouldn't call up my pharmacy. Nor do I own a single face cream, and I've never been to any of the men's "hair stylists" for a tinting or a spray. I go to a funny old-fashioned barber who just cuts my hair and doesn't try to make me look younger than when I went in. If anything, his conversation sends me out older.
All of this makes me a member of American's newest minority group: an adult male untouched by rejuvenating lotions, fragrances and dyes. "A case of galloping vanity has hit men in this country," Eugenia Sheppard writes," and any minute now there'll be masks, moisturizers, home hair coloring and hair sprays for men."
That minute is almost here. Hardly a day goes by when I don't read in the paper or see in a TV commercial some new evidence that...
From "Thank God for Nuts."
By any reasonable standard, nobody would want to look twice—or even once—at the piece of slippery elm bark from Clear Lake, Wisc., birthplace of pitcher Burleigh Grimes, that is on display at the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. As the label explains, it is the kind of bark that Grimes chewed during fames "to increase saliva for throwing the spitball. When wet, the ball sailed to the plate in deceptive fashion." This would seem to be one of the least interesting facts available in America today.
But baseball fans can't be judged by any reasonable standard. We are obsessed by the minutiae of the game and nagged for the rest of our lives by the memory of players we once saw play. No item is therefore too trivial that puts us back in touch with them. I am just old enough to remember Burleigh Grimes and his well moistened pitches sailing deceptively to the plate, and when I found his bark I studied it as intently as if I had come upon the Rosetta Stone. "So that's how he did it," I thought, peering at the odd botanical relic. "Slippery elm! I'll be damned."
This was only one of several hundred encounters that I had with my own boyhood as I prowled through the Museum, a handsome brick building on Main Street, only a peanut bag's throw from the pasture where Abner Doubleday allegedly invented the game in 1839. Probably no other museum is so personal a pilgimage to our past..."
In each example, Zinsser claims that a device—casual humor, pampering, an odd fact—that may not be fully congruent with an underlying, possibly more serious message of the entire article, nevertheless serves to draw the reader in through the first few paragraphs, so that "the reader is now safely hooked, and the hardest part of the writer's job is over."
There are several stock devices that Zinsser would retire, including the "future archaeologist," the "man from Mars," or the button-nose boy who is always doing something cute.
What works for Zinsser are leads that develop as unfolding glimpses promising revelation of a riddle, one revealed fact accreting at a time, or the masterful arrangement of dazzling sentences gathering momentum and building toward a "mordant truth." What works best is to share with a reader the same sense of joy or humor that the author encourntered originally, suggests Zinsser. Nevertheless, Zinsser again stops us cold: "And yet there can be no fixed rules for how to write a lead. Within the broad principle of not letting the reader get away, every writier must approach his subject (William! Don't women write, too?) in a manner that most naturally suits what he is writing about and who he is."
...The Ending
Zinsser urges us to give nearly as much thought to the ending of an article as we do to the lead: "an article that doesn't stop at its proper stopping place is suddently a drag and therefore, ultimately, a failure."
Don't let the reader know it's coming, the slow cranking of the insulting recapitulation, the summary listing of the main points, suggesting the reader is thought of as such a dullard that it must all be spelled out once again so that meaning can penetrate at last. The reader has an option, and will take it, exiting abruptly. But beyond merely avoiding a bad ending for the sake of the negative, Zinsser commends to us the possibility of an ending..."a good last sentence—or paragraph—is a joy in iteslf. It has its own virtues, which give the readera lift and which linger when the article is over."
But Zinsser pauses, stage left, to suggest that perhaps it is best to leave with a quote, or a surprise out of left field, or...
Reference
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William Zinsser, 1985. On Writing Well: An informal guide to writing nonfiction. 3rd. ed. (there is a more recent edition) Harper and Row.