Bicyclists -- Nuts!

Up to now, you guys have been doing pretty well with nut grafs. Not so much on this exercise, though.

Many of you were missing nut grafs, leaving a hole between the lede summarizing the story, and the body of the story offering a chronological telling of how events unfolded.

What a nut graf would have offered in those situations is more detail to support your lede. And that in and of itself would have allowed for a less jarring transition from a brief and general lede to a timeline telling.

Here's a good sequence of lede-nut graf-chronology:

A local bicycist was released from Mueller Memorial Hospital two days ago after spending four months there while recovering from injuries after being hit by a car while biking in Holt.

Marsha Taylor, a 37-year-old Harvard University graduate and McDonald's employee of 15 years, said the accident happened soon after she finished the U.S. tour. She had been back in Holt for about two weeks when the accident occurred.

"I was riding down 72nd Street almost to Southland Boulevard when a car hit me from behind and sent me flying off my bike," Taylor said.

Imagine if the nut graf was missing here. You start hearing Taylor's story before you have enough of a summation to know what she is going to detail.

Nut grafs allow you to offer that extra level of detail that essentially forms a mini-story atop the body of a story. In the same way a lede gives you the bare minimum you need to know about a story, the nut graf gives readers the bare minimum of background and details to make broader sense of the lede.

Again, you need to forget about classic English composition where the ending is at the end of the story. Here, the ending is at the start. Be sure to have a complete enough ending before people get into the meat of the story.