Communicating to Pack a Punch

If you want to write stronger reports, speeches, and presentations take the advice of top journalists: don’t bury the lead.

Journalist, author, screenwriter, and funny woman Nora Ephron tells a wonderful story to illustrate this point. Many years ago, Ephron was in high school when the teacher asked the class to write a lead for this newspaper story:

“Kenneth L. Peters, principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college professor Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.”

Ephron along with her fellow students condensed the five Ws – who, what, where, when, and why – into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchens will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento…blah, blah, blah.”

The teacher collected the leads, scanned them rapidly, and paused. Finally, he looked up and said, “The lead of the story is this: “There will be no school next Thursday.”

“It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalled. For the rest of the year, she said, we became detectives searching for the hidden point behind every assignment that would produce a great story.

Several years ago, I worked with a new college president on her inaugural speech. She was a talented writer. Her speech was beautifully crafted, yet something was missing. It sounded flat.

Looking closer, we realized she took too long to make her point. By bringing the central point to the beginning of the speech, she could capture her audience’s attention instantly.

It’s not enough to know the who, what, when, where, and how; you have to know why it matters. And whether it’s a report, story, speech, or presentation, when you report it early on, you’re guaranteed to garner attention.




By Randy Siegel