Your lead must capture the readers immediately and hook them to keep reading.
“The most important sentence in any article is the first one,” wrote William Zinsser. “If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead.”
If you don’t want your writing to be dead on arrival, pay heed. This includes articles, blog posts, or emails to attract high-paying clients.
Zinsser taught nonfiction writing in the 1970s at Yale University and was the author of On Writing Well, arguably the greatest book ever written on the subject. His chapter on the lead was drawn from his experience as a contributor to The New Yorker and other leading magazines.
Speaking of the lead, author and advertising great David Ogilvy famously wrote: “You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it. You cannot save souls in an empty church.” Like Zinsser, Ogilvy believed the lead must capture the readers immediately and hook them to keep reading.
If you want to hook readers, here are a few techniques to employ:
Ask a question lead. Consider this opening line from the musical Hamilton: “How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?”
Author Lin Manuel-Miranda certainly knew how to hook an audience.
What provocative question could you start your article with?
Alliteration or wordplay lead. Again from Hamilton: “The ten-dollar founding father without a father got a lot farther by working a lot harder, by being a lot smarter, by being a self-starter; by fourteen, they placed him in charge of a trading charter.”
One of my all-time favorites, and I regret I can’t remember the source, is: “The moon shines still on the moonshine hills of Kentucky.” The article was about the booming illegal moonshining business.
Here’s one from Entertainment Weekly: “A heaven-sent comedy is ending a hell of a journey” (Dan Snierson’s January 30, 2020, article about the television show The Good Place).
Quote a famous person lead. “What would life be without coffee?” King Louis XV of France is said to have asked. “But then, what is life even with coffee?” he added (from an article titled “The War on Coffee,” in the April 27, 2020 issue for The New Yorker.)
Here’s a great new place to go to find quotes to inspire your famous person leads:
The Book of Greatest Leadership Quotations from Hatherleigh Press presents quotations which apply leadership thoughts to the world. Ideal for business, community, or other leadership commentary, here is a book that can help you find essential inspiration for your leads.
Here are some pithy favorites from this slender book:
“If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade,” said author Tom Peters.
“Everyone has an invisible sign hanging around their neck that says: ‘Make me feel important.’” said entrepreneur Mary Kay Ash.
“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough,” said race car driver Mario Andretti.
The book’s promotional copy says: “From CEOs of big companies to politicians, from sport figures and military personnel, the concept of leadership varies yet the universality of motivating a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal is key.”
Perhaps a great quote will motivate your readers to keep reading.
