(5) Compare the leads of the two following stories of the same event, pointing out their merits and defects; then write a new lead embodying the best points of each.
(1)
Princeton, N.J., Nov. 3—Governor Woodrow Wilson had a narrow escape from serious injury at an early hour this morning when the automobile in which he was returning home from Red Bank ran into a rut in the main street leading into the little village of Hightstown, throwing him with great force against the top of the limousine, inflicting a painful cut in the top of his head.
When he appeared in his library this afternoon to meet many callers and the newspaper men the governor wore across the top of his head a broad plaster bandage, covering part of the scalp that had been shaved when the cut was dressed.
Captain “Silent Bill” McDonald, the Texas ranger traveling companion of the governor, received a severe jolt, but escaped any other injury than a bruise on his neck.
(2)
Princeton, N.J., Nov. 3—Gov. Woodrow Wilson wears a strip of collodion and gauze across the top of his head covering a scalp wound three inches long which he received early on Sunday in a motor mishap on the way home from Red Bank, N.J. His automobile struck a mound in the road and jolted him up against a steel rib in the roof of the limousine car.
The wound is not serious and the democratic presidential nominee will fulfill his speaking engagements in Paterson and Passaic, N.J., on Monday.
At night the governor was in the parlor of his home the center of a group of friends. There was nothing in his manner to indicate that he had met with any mishap. He said he did not feel the wound in the slightest degree and had not even developed a headache from it.
“I guess I’m too hardheaded to be hurt,” he said smilingly as he received the correspondents.