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When it comes to writing essays, it's good to start with a
clear focus and sense of where the essay is going. That's where
the thesis statement comes in.
The thesis statement is that sentence or two that spells out
the focus and scope of your essay. You can't deal with every
aspect of a subject in the one essay. But you can focus your
essay on a very specific element and define that in your thesis
statement.
In journalism, there's a similar concept called the
lead (or lede).
In a single paragraph, a lead must summarize the basic facts
of a story and convey to a reader what you found out in your
reporting. But it must be more than just an opening to your story.
The lead must also catch a reader's or listener's attention and
make them want to read the rest of your story.
Journalists are taught a simple rule about basic news leads,
called the "5-W's." They are: Who?
What? Where? When? Why? A sentence or paragraph that
gives a reader the answer to all the five W's will automatically
summarize any story.
There are many other kinds of news leads, but they all fall
into two categories: "hard" leads and
"soft" leads. The choice depends on the
nature of the story and determines the form of the rest of the
story. A hard lead is suited for an urgent, breaking event, while
a soft lead is more indirect and suited to feature writing.
A hard lead:
If Canada and France don't reach an agreement on fish quotas
by Sept. 30 Ottawa will unilaterally impose one, Fisheries Minister
John Crosbie says.
-- St. John's Evening Telegram, Sept. 16, 1992.
A soft lead:
Bryan Adams spoke and the fans listened.
"Be good to Osoyoos," Adams told the crowd of 30,000
who gathered in the Okanagan town Sunday for the only B.C. stop
in his Waking Up the Nation tour.
"Osoyoos has been good to you tonight. So have a good time
and don't wreck the place."
Then the clean cut kid from North Vancouver gave the fans what
they had come for.
-- Vancouver Sun, Sept. 8, 1992
In language arts class, teachers can encourage students to
write leads for news stories as a way to help them focus their
writing and summarize the premise of a particular piece of writing.
- Choose a story from the news pages of a daily newspaper.
Divide your class into small groups. Ask one half of each group
to read the story and then come up with a list of the 5
W's that factor into this story. Once they have listed
the main elements of the story, ask the rest of the group to
write an opening sentence (the lead) based on the information
they are given. Give the students an opportunity to read their
leads to the class and then compare them to the lead from the
original story. Discuss the ways the various leads serve to focus
the story and introduce the main elements of the story to the
audience.
- Look through several major newspapers online (check out SNN's daily news links) and identify
a story that's been covered by at least three of them. Print
each of the stories and isolate the 5W's in each
of them. Then compare the leads of the stories. Does each writer
include the same information in their story? If so, are the leads
similar? The goal is to look at each story and see if all of
the reporters focussed on the same information in their leads.
If they didn't wind up with the same leads, is there an obvious
reason for this?
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