The first sentence does the heavy lifting

Most readers decide in one sentence. Not one paragraph, one sentence. A school newspaper has an even shorter window than a city paper, because its readers are classmates who are scrolling between a quiz and lunch. So the first sentence of a story is where a student reporter earns or loses the next two minutes.

The Light's archive is a good place to watch this happen, because it holds ten years of first sentences written by different staffs with different habits. Some of them work beautifully. Some of them clear their throat. Here are a few, with what each one teaches.

The picture lede

The 2014 sports feature A Look At MA Vignola '16 opens like this:

If you’ve ever attended an SUA soccer game, the chances are that you’ve seen #15, junior Mary Alice Vignola, race across the field to make an assist or score a goal.

That sentence does four jobs. It puts you in the bleachers. It gives you a jersey number, which is the kind of small, checkable detail that makes readers trust a writer. It names the subject and her year. And it shows her doing the thing the story is about. The statistics come in the second sentence, where they belong, after you already care.

The lesson is simple and hard: start with something a reader could see. A number on a jersey, a line of people wrapped around a convention center, a grill that cannot cook pancakes and burgers at the same time. Abstractions can wait.

The throat-clear

Compare the opening of The Syrian Refugee Story, from December 2015:

The Syrian Refugee Crisis is a current event that many are familiar with, but don’t fully understand.

Nothing in it is wrong. It just tells the reader nothing they did not already know from the headline. The real lede is buried in the next sentences, where the writer explains that the crisis began in March 2011 after teenagers painted slogans on their school wall. That is an astonishing fact for a high school audience: a war that started, in part, with students and a wall. Moved to the top, it would have pulled every reader at SUA into the rest of the piece.

A test that works on almost any draft: cover your first sentence with your hand and read from the second. If the story loses nothing, delete the first one.

The same pattern shows up in Writing for the Wall Street Journal, a 2017 report on a visit from Ellen Byron, a Journal staff reporter. It begins, "We have all heard of The Wall Street Journal." The second paragraph holds the news: on October 16, 2017, a reporter with 17 years at the paper stood in front of SUA students. Start there, or better, start with the sharpest thing she said, and the piece gets moving a paragraph sooner.

The question lede, used well and used lazily

Questions are the most overused opening in student journalism, and also one of the most effective when they are earned. The Infamous Fact Checker (2016) earns it:

You have submitted assignments through this program. Your teachers use this program. This program ensures that your facts are creatively your own. What’s the name of this program? Turn-It-In.

It works because the reader already knows the answer. The repetition builds a small, shared groan, and the reveal lands. That is a riddle, not a question, and riddles are fine.

The question that fails is the one the reader cannot answer and does not care about yet: "Have you ever wondered about the history of X?" Usually, no. If you open with a question, make it one your audience has actually asked out loud in the hallway.

The 2018 scouting feature, Could You Earn your Adventure Badge like Russell from "UP"?, opens with "Can’t wait for those Girl Scout Cookies?" It is a soft question, but it is pinned to something every reader in February knows is coming, and the story ends by answering it with a date. That symmetry is worth stealing. The feature went on to be cited in a Wikipedia article on scouting in popular culture, which is a fair measure of how far a well-built student piece can travel.

The inventory and the wink

Two more types turn up again and again in the archive.

The inventory lede lists things. Breakfast All Day at McDonald's starts with "Pancakes, Egg McMuffins, cinnamon melts," and it works because the list is specific and appetizing, and because the story then turns on a business question the list does not hint at. An inventory lede needs that turn, or it reads like a menu.

The wink lede is a joke tied to the subject. The 2017 profile of a biology teacher opens, "In the spirit of evolution, shall we start at the beginning?" It is a little corny. It also tells you the subject teaches evolution, signals that the piece will be warm rather than formal, and promises chronology. Corny is allowed if the sentence is doing real work underneath.

The dateline opening

News writers are taught to keep the date out of the first words of a story, and for straight news that is usually right. First-person event pieces are different. What It's Like to See Malala In Person opens on a date and a place, October 21, 2016, and an American Dental Association meeting in Denver where Malala Yousafzai gave the keynote. The unlikely setting is the hook: a Nobel laureate and a convention full of dentists.

The piece is really an essay, built from what the writer saw and heard, including Malala naming The Alchemist as her favorite book and calling education "the answer." Student writers asked to turn a figure like Malala into an argument, rather than an afternoon, can compare it with an annotated essay on Malala Yousafzai that builds a thesis from the same life story. The two forms ask different things of a first sentence. A reported piece needs a scene. An essay needs a claim.

Five habits worth keeping

None of this is a formula, but a few habits show up in the strongest openings in the archive.

• Find the one fact that would surprise your own classmates, and see whether it can go first.
• Prefer a thing someone could see or hear to a thing someone could only think.
• Keep the first sentence under about 35 words. The Vignola lede is 31; it feels shorter because every word carries weight.
• Save background for the third paragraph. Readers will tolerate context once they are hooked, rarely before.
• Read the headline and the first sentence together. If they say the same thing, one of them is wasted.

Rewriting ledes is cheap. It costs five minutes and it changes who finishes your story. The staffs who wrote for The Light learned that one issue at a time, and the archive keeps their drafts in public, good openings and slow ones side by side, which is more useful to a new reporter than any rule.