Re: burying the lead

Donna Richoux filted:

This reminds me of the longer articles in the New Yorker. When I started
reading them in the 1970s, I was intrigued to notice how slowly they
began -- describing someone's morning, for example, or someone's
childhood. It might take a page and half before we readers are ever told
*why* this person's story is worth knowing, what they did that was such
an accomplishment, or what remarkable incident they were involved in. I
had to take it on faith that this was indeed leading somewhere, and I
think the payoff in the degree of interest in the subject, once it
finally was revealed, was enhanced.

I must admit, sometimes I glanced ahead, read enough to get interested,
then went back to the beginning.

It's a good job James Michener doesn't write newspaper articles, eh?...still, it
is possible to go too far the other way...a quote from
http://www.tvrundown.com/bookblck.html:

Pow! Wham! Bam! Slam-bang language in the comics doesn't hurt anyone, but must
we jolt our listeners like that? A recent example from local radio: "Guilty!
That's the verdict from a Boulder County jury after a strangulation death. We
get the details from ..." And from network television: "Indicted! The federal
government comes down hard on Eastern Airlines." The anchor opened the newscast
by reading that headline over a videotape showing the inside of a hangar and an
Eastern jet. ... Confused! That's what I am by one-word leads. Why?
Conversational, they're not. People don't talk that way. And people don't listen
that way. Our ears are accustomed to the standard speech pattern among
English-speaking people: subject-verb-object. ... People usually start
conversations with a subject, then go on to a verb: "Don dropped dead." No one
would tell you: "Dead. That's what Don is."

(end quotation...incidentally, you have no idea how hard it is to Google for
"Dead! That's what xxx is" when you don't remember the value of xxx...searching
"dead that's what", even after filtering out pages with the word "parrot", still
gets you tons of parodies of the famous Python sketch)....r


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