My highlighter is back, and it's long overdue

Some of you may think I'm belaboring this point since I made it when editing several of your profiles, but I had meant to get to Zinsser's Chapter 9 sooner than this. So please bear with me as we follow along with the highlighter.

Here's the first thing Zinsser (above) says in "The Lead and the Ending" and what I wrote at the top of some of your papers:

"The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead."

There couldn't be anything more important when writing for a purpose -- for pay, to entertain, to inform, whatever. If your readers stop reading, you have not achieved your purpose. Hook them with facts, with something they didn't know (called news in my old business), with humor, with mystery, but mostly with clear, strong, specific language, something that's easy to follow, easy to relate to.

You may move in "leisurely circles," as Zinsser says, toward your eventual point, but this is certainly true:

"Readers want to know -- very soon -- what's in it for them."

If this doesn't come in the first sentence, it should show up fairly soon. In journalism, it's known as the "nut graf," the paragraph that tells the nut of the story -- the reason why the readers might care and should keep reading. Editor, and readers, like to see it in the second or third graf.

So you get the reader's attention, tell them what you are up to and then start lacing together paragraphs that keep the reader going (see "Managing the Murky Middle" in an earlier post to this blog).

Do that until you get to where you reward your reader for persisting: A gift of an ending.

More on that, and "spiraling," too, at a later date.

See you Tuesday night at the front entrance to Odegaard Undergraduate Library. See map in a post below.