Today's writing tip
Take a stick in one hand and a beer in the other. Whenever you feel the urge to write a lede like this:
It's no use crying over spilt milk, the old saying goes.
... hit yourself on the head with the stick and have a sip of the beer. Repeat as necessary until the urge goes away.
It's no use crying over spilt milk, the old saying goes.
... hit yourself on the head with the stick and have a sip of the beer. Repeat as necessary until the urge goes away.
Labels: ledes
posted by fev at 10:17 AM
2 Comments:
I heard an even better lead on the Today show last week. It was more or less, "Yesterday couple X felt like they won the lottery, and that's because they did."
What you got in a case like that is lack of intellectual consideration of the output. Sted looking for the "mot juste," the writer taps out "just a mot." That's after finding something tangentially related in Bartlett's or Google or something else easy without considering what the "brightly written phrase" related to.
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