armed with two leads, and sometimes with three.

=101. Two Kinds of Leads.=--The story, technically, is made up of two
parts--the lead and the body. The lead is easily the more important. If
a reporter can handle successfully this part of the story, he will have
little trouble in writing the whole. The lead is the first sentence or
the first group of sentences in the story and is of two kinds, the
summarizing lead and what may be called the informal lead. The
summarizing lead gives in interesting, concise language the gist of the
story. The informal lead merely introduces the reader to the story
without intimating anything of the outcome, but with a suggestion that
something interesting is coming. Of the two types the summarizing lead
is by far the more common and may be considered first.

=102. Summarizing Lead.=--The summarizing lead may be a single sentence
or a single paragraph, or two or three paragraphs, according to the
number and complexity of the details in the story. A brief story usually
has a short lead. A long, involved story made up of several parts, each
under a separate head, often has a lead consisting of several
paragraphs. Sometimes this lead, because of its importance as a summary
of all the details in the story, is even boxed and printed in black-face
type at the beginning of the story. Then follow the different parts,
each division with its own individual lead.

=103. Contents of the Lead.=--What to put into the lead,--or to feature,
as reporters express it in newspaper parlance,--one may best determine
by asking oneself what in the story is likely to be of greatest interest
to one's readers in general. Whatever that feature is, it should be
played up in the lead. The first and great commandment in news writing
is that the story begin with the most important fact and give all the
essential details first. These details are generally summarized in the
questions _who_, _what_, _when_, _where_, _why_, and _how_. If the
writer sees that his lead answers these questions, he may be positive
that, so far as context is concerned, his lead will be good.

=104. Construction of the Lead.=--In constructing the lead, the most
important fact or facts should be put at the very first. For this
reason, newspaper men avoid beginning a story with _to-day_,
_to-morrow_, or _yesterday_, because the time at which an incident has
occurred is rarely the most important fact. For the same reason, careful
writers avoid st