Lead Beginning with a Phrase.=--Infinitive, participial, and
prepositional phrases are valuable mainly for bringing out emphatic
details. But the writer must be careful, particularly in participial
constructions, to see that the phrases have definite words to modify.

|To see if the bullet was coming was the reason |
|Charlie Roberts, aged 7, 2626 Ninth Street, looked |
|down his father's pistol barrel at 8:00 A.M. to-day.|

|Playing with a rifle longer than his body, |
|three-year-old Ernest Rodriguez, of Los Angeles, |
|accidentally shot himself in the abdomen this |
|morning and is dying in the county hospital. |

|Almost blinded with carbolic acid, Fritz Storungot, |
|of South Haven, groped his way to Patrolman Emil |
|Schulz at Third Street and Brand Avenue last night |
|and begged to be sent to the Emergency Hospital. |

|With her hands and feet tied, Ida Elionsky, 16, swam|
|in the roughest kind of water through Hell Gate |
|yesterday, landing safely at Blackwell's Island. |

=110. Lead Beginning with Absolute Construction.=--The absolute
construction usually features causes and motives forcibly, but it should
be avoided by beginners, as it is un-English and tends to make sentences
unwieldy. The following illustrates the construction well:

|Her money gone and her baby starving, Mrs. Kate |
|Allen, 8 Marvin Alley, begged fifteen cents of a |
|stranger yesterday to poison herself and child. |

=111. Accuracy and Interest in the Lead.=--The two requirements made of
the lead are that it shall possess accuracy and interest. It must have
accuracy for the sake of truth. It must possess interest to lure the
reader to a perusal of the story. Toward an attainment of both these
requirements the reporter will have made the first step if he has
organized his material rightly, putting at the beginning those facts
that will be of most interest to his readers.

=112. Clearness.=--But the reporter will still fail of his purpose if he
neglects to make his lead clear. He must guard against any construction
or the inclusion of any detail that is liable to blur the absolute
clarity of his initial sentences. In particular, he must be wary of
overloaded leads, those crowded with details. It is better to cut such
leads into two or more short, crisp sentences than to permit them to be
published with the p