Tuesday, September 27, 2011

More Ledes: Clarity Via Word Order

Often, word order can help create clarity by putting information in a sequence that clearly spells out what happened. Conversely, poor word order can leave things a bit jumbled.

In that sense, this lede had a bit of room for improvement:

A 22-year-old died in a car accident this morning on the way to his wedding by veering off the road to avoid hitting a stray dog.

In this case, you could have arranged fact sequence to pair up commonalities, like this:

A 22-year-old on the way to his wedding died in a car accident this morning by veering off the road to avoid hitting a stray dog.

Before, the fact the man died and how and why he died was split in half by the wedding mention. In the reordering, the crash elements are placed together, and now the sentence flows a bit better.

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