Murder -- Nuts!

Happy to see lots of good nut grafs in this exercise. You filled the 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 offered in those situations is more detail to support your lede. And that in and of itself 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 robbery at the North Point Inn restaurant in Okemos yesterday resulted in the death of one employee while another employee managed to stay safe by locking herself in her office.

Cook Kevin Blohm was found dead with large knife wounds in his chest and hand after police came to the scene, according to bookkeeper Nina Cortez.

Cortez said the robbery too place shortly after 9 a.m., when she arrived at the restaurant to start counting revenue from the previous day.

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.

Here's another good lede-nut-chronology sequence:

A local restaurant cook was stabbed t death yesterday morning when an unidentified male and a possible accomplice robbed the North Point Inn in Okemos, according to the restaurant's bookkeeper.

Kevin Blohm, one of the cooks at the restaurant, was found dead on the floor in the reception area of the restaurant by the Okemos Police Department and and the restaurant's bookkeeper, Nina Cortez. Blohm had a large knife wound in his chest and another on his hand.

At approximately 9 a.m. Cortez was sitting in her office going through receipts and cash from the previous evening when a man walked around the corner holding a knife, she said.