This sentence answers all the essential questions. Note that the writer does not begin with the fact of the explosion and work toward the loss of life, but tells at once, in the simplest manner possible, that 100 men may have perished. This is the vital fact of the story. No words are wasted in preliminaries. Without attempt at ornamentation, the writer goes directly to the heart of the story. It is conceivable that he might have written, in the conventional fashion of those who have formed the habit of beginning every story with a participle:
Struggling vainly to escape from the poisonous gases that filled every innermost recess, 100 helpless miners, caught like rats in a trap, met death as the result of, etc.
Note the difference in effect between the short, clear statement of fact and the lead that attempts to gain the reader’s attention by “fine writing.” Get rid of the idea that because a sentence is simple it is weak. The Bible says “Jesus wept.” If the average writer were called upon to put that fact into words, he would probably rack his brain for descriptive epithets. Yet the Bible tells it all in two words of one syllable each—a verb and its subject—of more compressed power than a page of thundering adjectives.
When the lead cannot be told in a single sentence without danger of clumsiness and confusion, don’t hesitate to divide it into several sentences. In the first sentence tell the most important thing—the climax—in order to grip the reader’s attention. Then tell the other facts needed for a quick understanding of the story and after that develop the story logically.
OBSERVANCE OF STYLE
Your style of writing the lead will depend somewhat on the custom of the paper for which you are working. Some newspapers still insist rigidly on the who-what-when-where-why rule for beginning all except feature stories and short items. Others are departing more and more from the rule. The tendency nowadays on a few well-edited newspapers (notably the Kansas City Star and Times) is to tell the story chronologically from the start, leaving out the lead or introduction altogether, except perhaps in the case of especially important happenings such as the mine disaster referred to above. This is probably the result of the growing importance of the headline in the modern newspaper. Formerly newspapers were content to use general headings, such as “Very Important,” “The Latest from Europe” and “Court News,” but the present-day newspaper aims to tell the story specifically in the head. Thus the average news story really is put before the reader three times—once in the head, again in the lead and finally in the story proper. Doubt of the wisdom in all cases of this double repetition is responsible for the tendency to drop the lead and let the headline usurp its place. No invariable rules as to when this is advisable can be laid down. The writer should study carefully the style of his paper and be guided by it.
LEADS TO BE AVOIDED
It is a good general rule, and one enforced by nearly all newspapers, to avoid beginning a story with the time. An exception may be made, of course, when the time of a happening is the factor that makes the story. Ordinarily the time is not important enough to be put first in the sentence, though it should be told well toward the beginning of the story. Similarly, avoid starting a story with the place. The weakness of the lead that violates these rules is shown in the following sentence:
At 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon, at Sixth and Market streets, William Jones was shot and killed, etc.
Avoid the trite lead, such as “caught like rats in a trap” and “never in the history of.” The newspaper writer unconsciously accumulates a vast stock of convenient trite phrases, on which he is tempted to draw when working hurriedly. A moment’s thought, however, will nearly always suggest a better way of expression.