A good lead grabs the readers’ attention from the first second. The lead has all the information you need to know about the article right there in the first sentence.
For each article there are six questions that can be asked: who, what, where, when, why, and how. If the answers to these questions are all in the lead of the story then that lead is a success.
The lead provides the reader with a quick synopsis of the article and if intriguing enough the reader will want to read on in order to get the full details.
There are many different types of leads, depending on which kind of story you would like to write. There’s the “you” lead, the inverted pyramid lead, the immediate-identification lead, the delayed-identification lead, the summary lead, and the multiple-element lead.
To make each of these types of leads a good lead you have to grab the audiences’ attention right off the bat. The readers quickly look at the first few sentences of an article before they decide to continue reading or to move onto the next one.
A good lead can make all the difference in how many people read your article. By having all the information for a quick overview of the article in the lead the readers will have an idea of what the full article is about and choose to read on.
Source: Telling the Story: The Convergence of Print, Broadcast, and Online Media by The Missouri Group
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