Truth 14. Effective messages lead with strength

Did you freeze whenever your high school or college teachers told you to develop “a strong thesis statement” for your “essays”?

Journalists have a much more encouraging way of talking about an opening. They call it the lead. For a newspaper or magazine article—and for broadcast journalism as well—the opening statement has a lot of work to do: It must pull the reader in, represent the full content of the document, establish accurate expectations, create the tone, and more.

A lead for an advertising or promotional document works even harder to attract attention and set up the reader to view the rest of the piece favorably. In both journalism and advertising, the lead must answer that essential “what’s in it for me?” question: Why should I care?

Business communication is not very different. Whether you’re writing a letter, memo, report to your boss or a colleague, white paper, proposal, news release, home page of a Web site, or an article for your company’s newsletter, the lead must focus your audience’s attention and crystallize the core of your message.

The lead can be a sentence, a paragraph, or more, depending on the nature and length of the document. If your message is delivered via e-mail, you should consider the subject line as an important part of your lead.

Professional writers probably spend half their time developing the right lead. That’s because when you start right, the rest will follow (although it often works in reverse—many writers create or rewrite their lead after the rest of the story is finished).

Here’s a useful way to think about the lead. It must:

• Tell your specific audience how your subject relates to them.

• Indicate why the subject is important in general.

• Suggest what you will be asking them to do.

Someone we know who was trained to write in the army says he learned: “Put the bottom line on top.” It’s a good rule to follow. To see why, just look critically at the e-mail messages you receive in the course of a day. How much time do you spend figuring out why each person wrote to you, if the message is of interest, and whether you should read, file, or delete it?

Wouldn’t it be a more perfect (and efficient) world if you knew exactly what every message was about and what interest it held for you, after reading just the subject line and the first sentence or two?

Realistically, it’s the same for every kind of writing, from letters selling insurance to reports to your boss, a note to the Purchasing Dept. and announcements of all kinds. If the first paragraph or so doesn’t catch us, we stop reading. Suppose you receive the following memo about a training seminar.

Subject: Training seminar November 8

I’m pleased to tell you that my department has been charged with planning and implementing a series of workshops to upgrade new managers’ skills. The resources were provided by HR after an analysis of staff capabilities and company needs. Sessions will be offered every month for the rest of the year. On November 8…

So far, who cares? If you’re having a busy day, will you be drawn to read further and find out what HR is congratulating itself for? Here’s an alternative.

Subject: Nov. 8—Learn to be a great presenter

You’re invited to a special morning workshop on November 8th: “How to Deliver Dynamite Presentations.” This major leadership skill was pinpointed by HR as key to manager success, and we’re flying an expert in from Chicago to lead the session.

Maybe you have something better to do on November 8, but you understand the opportunity, right? You’ll read the rest for details if the workshop appeals to you. If it doesn’t, you recognize your disinterest faster.

The point is, when you’re writing, lead with strength: Start with the best reasons why the people you’re addressing should be interested. They’ll always want to know how the matter affects them and will read down to the details if it does.

Provided you’ve done the brainstorming work we recommend, you now just need to look at your content mapping list. Pick what’s most important, relevant to your audience, and intriguing if possible, and make that your lead, in whole or part.

When you’re writing the memo, how do you arrive at a lead like the second one? Your preliminary thinking tells you. You already know:

• Your goal—To get good attendance at the workshop, which is voluntary.

• Your audience—New and middle managers who badly need to develop presentation skills but may not want to take the time, may fear speaking before an audience, or doubt the session will be helpful.

• Your content—This workshop can directly help the target audience polish a major skill…the skill matters to the company…the session will be taught by a very good person…plan to reserve the time. Plus details about where and when, how to sign up, and so forth.

• Best way of organizing the material—For the medium you’re using—e-mail—you must quickly get your points across so that the recipients don’t filter the message out.

Now you can build a lead paragraph that covers as many of the content points as you can.