Just plain ordinary geese and a few ganders held up
a train on the Milwaukee road to-day and forced
their owner, Nepomcyk Kucharski, 1287 Fourth Avenue,
into district court.
=Cause and Result=
Because Harry A. Harries, 24, 2518 North Avenue,
wanted two dollars for a license to marry Anna
Francis, 17, 4042 Peachtree Avenue, his aged mother
is dying this morning in St. Elizabeth Hospital.
Sometimes, particularly in follow or rewrite stories, probable results become the feature.
=Probable Results=
That immediate intervention in Mexico by the United
States will be the result of the Villa raid last
night on Columbus, N.M., is the general belief in
official Washington this morning.
Another feature often played up in leads is the means or method by which a result was attained.
=Means=
A sensational half-mashie shot to the lip of the cup
on the eighteenth green won to-day for Mrs. Roland
H. Barlow, of the Merion Cricket Club, Philadelphia,
over Miss Lillian B. Hyde, of the South Sh.o.r.e Field
Club, Long Island, in the second round of the
women's national golf championship tournament at the
Onwentsia Club.
=Method=
Working at night with a tin spoon and a wire nail,
Capt. Wilhelm Schuettler dug 100 feet to liberty and
escaped from the Hallamshire camp sometime early
this morning.
Often it is necessary to feature the name:
=Name=
Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa, archbishop of
Bologna, Italy, was to-day elected supreme pontiff
of the Catholic hierarchy, in succession to the late
Pope Pius X, who died Aug. 20. He will reign under
the name of Benedict XV.
=Name=
President Wilson and Mrs. Norman Galt have selected
Sat.u.r.day, Dec. 18, as the date of their marriage.
The ceremony will be performed in Mrs. Galt's
residence, and the guests will be confined to the
immediate members of the President's and Mrs. Galt's
families.
Even the place and the time have to be featured occasionally.
=Place=
New Orleans will be the place of the annual meeting
of the Southern Congress of Education and Industry,
it was learned from a member of the Executive
committee to-day.
=Place=
Chicago was selected by the Republican National
committee to-night as the meeting place of the 1916
Republican national convention, to be held June 7,
one week before the Democratic convention in St.
Louis.
=Time=
Monday, Sept. 20, is the date finally set for the
opening of the State Fair, it was announced by the
Program Committee to-day.
=105. Form of the Lead.=--The grammatical form in which the lead shall be written depends much on the purpose of the writer. Some of the commonest types of beginnings are with: (1) a simple statement; (2) a series of simple statements; (3) a conditional clause; (4) a substantive clause; (5) an infinitive phrase; (6) a participial phrase; (7) a prepositional phrase; (8) the absolute construction.
=106. Leads with Short Sentences.=--The value of the first two kinds is their forcefulness. Often reporters break what might be a long, one-sentence, summarizing lead into a very short sentence followed by a long one, or into a number of brief sentences, each of which gives one important detail. Such a type of lead gains its force from the fact that it lends emphasis to the individual details given in the short sentences. Note the effect of the following leads:
OAK PARK HAS A "TYPHOID MARY"
The epidemic of fever that has been sweeping through
the western suburb since the high school banquet
more than a month ago was traced yesterday to a
woman carrier who handled the food in the school
restaurant.
George Edward Waddell, our famous "Rube," fanned out
to-day. It was not the first time Rube had fanned,
but it will be his last. Tuberculosis claimed him
after a two-year fight.
If Mrs. Mary McCormick sneezes or coughs, she will
die. Her back was broken yesterday by a fall from a
third-story window. Thomas Wilson is being held
under a $5,000 bond pending her death or recovery,
charged by the police with pushing her from the
window.
=107. Lead Beginning with a Conditional Clause=--The lead beginning with a conditional clause is valuable for humorous effects or for summarizing facts leading up to a story. As a rule, however, one must avoid using more than two such clauses, as they are liable to make the sentence heavy or obscure.
If Antony Fisher, 36, 1946 Garden Street, had not
written Dorothy Clemens she was a "little love," he
would be worth $1,000,000 now. But he wrote Dorothy
she was a little love.
If Joe Kasamowitz, 4236 Queen's Avenue, speaks to
his wife either at her home or at the news-stand she
conducts at the St. Paul Hotel; if he loiters near
the entrance to the hotel; or if he even attempts to
call his wife over the telephone before Sat.u.r.day, he
will be in contempt of court, according to an
injunction issued to-day by Judge Fish.
=108. Lead Beginning with a Substantive Clause.=--The substantive clause has two main values in the lead,--to enable the writer to begin with a direct or an indirect question, and to permit him to shift to the very beginning of the lead important ideas that would normally come at the end of the sentence.
That Jim Jeffries was the greatest fighter in the
history of pugilism and Jim Corbett the best boxer,
was the statement last night by Bob Fitzsimmons
before a crowd of 5,000 at the Orpheum theater.
That he had refused to kiss her on her return from a
long visit and had said he was tired of being
married, was the testimony of Mrs. Flora Eastman
to-day in her divorce suit against Edwin O. Eastman,
of St. Louis.
=109. 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 h.e.l.l 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 possibility of not being understood. If a reader cannot grasp readily the lead, the chances are nine out of ten that he will not read the story. Note the following overloaded lead and its improvement by being cut into three sentences:
Barely able to see out of her swollen and discolored
eyes, and her face and body covered with cuts and
bruises, received, it is alleged, when her father
attacked her because of her failure to secure work,
Mary Ellis, 15 years old, living at 1864 Brown
Street, when placed on the witness stand Monday,
told a story which resulted in Peter Ellis, her
father, being arrested on a charge of a.s.sault with
intent to do great bodily harm.
Charged with beating unmercifully his daughter,
Mary, 15, because she could not obtain work, Peter
Ellis, 1864 Brown Street, was arraigned in police
court Monday. The girl herself appeared against
Ellis. Her body, when she appeared on the witness
stand, was covered with cuts and bruises, her face
black from the alleged blows, and her eyes so much
swollen that she could hardly see.
The following lead, too, is overloaded and all but impossible to understand:
Two letters written by H. M. Boynton, an advertising
agent for the Allen-Procter Co., to "Dear Louise,"
in which he confessed undying love and which are
replete with such terms of endearment as "little
love," "dear beloved," "sweetheart," "honey," and
just plain "love," and which were alleged by him to
have been forged by his wife, Mrs. Hannah Benson
Boynton, obtained a divorce for her yesterday in
district court on the grounds of alienated
affections.
Few readers would wade through this maze of shifted constructions and heavy, awkward phrasing for the sake of the divorce story following. In the following form, however, it readily becomes clear:
Two love letters to "Dear Louise" cost H. M.
Boynton, advertising agent for the Allen-Procter
Co., a wife yesterday in district court. The letters
were produced by Mrs. Hannah Benson Boynton to
support her charge of alienated affections, and were
replete with such terms of endearment as "undying
love," "honey," "sweetheart," "dear beloved,"
"little love," and just plain "love." Boynton
claimed that the letters were forged.