Basic Ledes: Don't Forget Your Articles!

I don't mean stories; I mean grammatical articles, like a, and, the.

This lede was missing its articles:

Three people taken to hospital after a train crashed into a sport-utility vehicle last night.

What you meant was this:

Three people were taken to a hospital after a train crashed into a sport-utility vehicle last night.

If you're wondering if you have proper articles in your lede, read it out loud. Does it sound like a complete sentence? Or does it sound like a robot talking?

If it's the latter, you're probably missing some articles.

This is a pretty common problem for newbie journos. I suspect it's because when we write story headlines, we do tend to leave out articles. But we don't do that in stories.