Think elevator pitch. Think love at first sight. Because you have mere seconds to engage readers' attention with the "lede" of a story: the first sentence (or paragraph. And yes, the misspelling's intentional, differentiating from the hot metal printers employed in the last century. But you'll also see "lead" referring to a tale's kickoff.)
Good story starts are tough to write, but worth the struggle. As Poynter's Chip Scanlan points out: "[a lede] makes a promise to the reader or viewer: I have something important, something interesting, to tell you. A good lead beckons and invites. It informs, attracts, and entices. If there's any poetry in journalism, it's most often found in the lead, as in the classic opening of what could have been a mundane weather forecast: 'Snow, followed by small boys on sleds.'"
Blogs, in particular, need to charm quickly, making ledes all the more critical. As noted above, aggregators excerpt those first 25 words: they are a post's calling card to the world, scrutinized by potential readers and search spiders alike. And, of course, readers haven't even invested spare change for a newspaper, $10 for a movie ticket or $30 for a hardback with a bestseller seal of approval. They have clicked upon your site – possibly an unknown site – for free and can just as easily click away to someone else's.
But a good lede pulls them in and entices them to stay. And the best can even survive the erosion of time, as writer John Barth reminds us: “A first sentence’s job is to draw its reader into the sentence after it – while at the same time, maybe establishing the tale’s tone and narrative viewpoint . . . some do that job so well that they remain in our memory long after we’ve forgotten most of the words that followed.”
Art: Children on sleds in Central Park, New York City, Bain News Service, c.a.1915. This image is available on Wikimedia Commons from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division under the digital ID cph.3c11106.
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