More Ledes: Fatals Suck

Sorry to say we had some fatals. Happy to say they didn't count again. This is the last exercise where fatals won't ruin your day -- again, you get a 10 out of 10 quiz grade in place of a 4.0 scale grade -- so let's please learn from these examples so we don't fatal when it counts.

Let's look at the first fatal lede:

Lansing city officials will now require all arrested citizens to pay a fee of $25 for their mug shots and fingerprints.

It's a nicely-structured lede, except for one thing: the city in question was East Lansing, not Lansing.

Can you find the fatal in the next lede?

Kennedy High School allows a student convicted of an armed robbery to play in football games and engage in other school activities.

The fatal could be that you labeled the student as convicted of armed robbery. We know he was arrested for armed robbery, but there was no information as to whether he was eventually convicted. When you are arrested and charged with something, you are accused of a crime. You aren't convicted until a judge or jury finds you guilty of a crime.

But that's not the fatal. The fatal is saying this is happening to a Kennedy High School kid. In fact, it's a Colonial High School kid.

The information you were given was that the East Lansing detective went to a Kennedy High football game to watch his son play for Kennedy. Kennedy was playing Colonial. And on Colonial's team the cop saw the criminal.

Yes, it's a little bit of a trick question. And that's on purpose. When I tell you guys that you have to understand what you're writing about, I'm not asking you if you know how to read or if you know English. I'm asking you if you understand the sequence of events and how things went down and what role each high school has in this instance.

That's what I mean by understanding what you write before you write it. And that's why before you start typing away, you need to go through your information and make sure you understand it.

Then again, it does also mean knowing the words you use. There's a fatal here:

Sara Howard thought today would be the happiest of her life when it turned into the worst, when her fiancee died in a car crash while swerving to avoid a dog.

This is the as-written version of one of the ledes I liked, which in that earlier version I corrected. Do you see the fatal?

It's with fiancee. A fiancee with two e's is defined as a woman awaiting marriage, while a man is known as a fiance, with just one e. You used two in referring to a guy. That's a fatal.

That's also an AP Style error. Please see AP Style under the heading of fiance, fiancee.