To be honest, I don’t remember ever learning about leads before, so this week’s lesson was all new to me! I never knew there were so many different types of leads. You can use a descriptive lead, an impact lead, a soft lead, a hard lead, an anecdotal lead, etc. There are so many to choose from that sometimes it is hard to decide. This week I wanted to focus on an example of a summary lead since it is the most used lead type in news writing.

This type of lead is often used in breaking news because it gives the main points in just one sentence so the reader does not need to read an entire story. A good summary lead should answer the 5 “W’s” and “H”: Who, what, when, where, why, and how. Here is an example of a summary lead from CNN this week:

(CNN) A 9-year-old boy killed in Chicago this week was "lured" into an alley and shot in a gang-related attack, authorities said.

In very few words, this lead effectively answers each of the W and H questions. This lead gives us a fairly complete picture of what happened without us having to read the remainder of the story. Personally, I like this type of lead the best because it is the easiest to create and understand. All leads are good and all of them can be effective when used correctly.

The editing mistake for this week comes from a meme that I saw on the internet recently.

This is an advertisement for a software to help kids learn, so you would think that they would at least use spell check. “Their” should be spelled “they’re”.