There are two words that every writer needs to know if they're going to learn how to write well: lede and kicker. Most writers will be familiar with these, but in case the terms are new to you, let’s define them.
A ‘lede’ is the punchy opening sentence of an article. A ‘kicker’ is the last.
If you can get them right, you can elevate your writing to a whole new level. In this article, we’ll explore how to improve your starting sentences and ending points to keep modern, online audiences engaged — from start to finish.
Get them interested, hook them in, and slow the scan, scroll or mouse click that’s desperately trying to take them away. The lede needs to do all of this and more — while being short and snappy and not giving too much away. So, how can we achieve this?
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” - 1984 by George Orwell
Okay. The first line of every blog post, eBook or report can’t always be an Orwellian classic that turns an everyday event into something extraordinary. But it can be just as attention-grabbing. Here’s how.
“‘The world’s attention is back on your cause.’ That was Bill Gates talking to agricultural scientists…”
Mayim Bialik has three decades of steady success on screens big and small, a neuroscience PhD, an adorable family with two teenaged boys, a sweet gig hosting Jeopardy! alongside Ken Jennings, and a hunky Canadian partner—both personal and professional—in Jonathan Cohen, with whom she makes her popular pandemic-born podcast, Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown. She is not, however, actually having a breakdown.
This same approach can be applied to subject matter experts, business owners, customers — whoever you’re writing about. Not just celebrities!
It’s important to remember, however, that the lede doesn’t have to cover everything. Following an engaging lede, we have what is colloquially known as the ‘NUT GRAF’, a paragraph that explains the article in a nutshell. The five Ws, if you will. This is the value, the meat, the draw to keep going. The lede has piqued their interest, but nut graf gives us that all-important extra context.
“Welcome to the future, where clean air is a luxury. Thanks to pandemics and wildfires, air purifiers have become the gotta-have-it home appliance.”
“I looked death in the face. All right, I didn't. I glimpsed him in a crowd. I've been diagnosed with cancer, of a very treatable kind. I'm told I have a 95% chance of survival. Come to think of it -- as a drinking, smoking, saturated-fat hound -- my chance of survival has been improved by cancer.”
The reader has made it to the end of your article. That’s a sure-fire sign you’ve done something right. But the kicker is what takes an article from good to great — and what leaves the reader wanting more.
"After all, tomorrow is another day." - Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Some say the perfect ending doesn’t exist. Margaret Mitchell begs to differ. This six-word kicker manages to encompass the protagonist’s resilient yet naive nature, themes that are explored throughout the novel, all while leaving readers on a hopeful, ambiguous cliffhanger. Here’s how you can mirror this.
‘Soon, there will be new actors to play the Queen and her consort: and soon, in real life, the cast must also change. Some of you will be lucky enough to see it all happen. Meanwhile the rest of us can go on being reminded about what life was once like. It would take an incurably radical spirit to contend that the Queen, if only by handing out a few hundred thousand tinsel gongs to people whose loyal devotion might have been a bit more expensive to purchase on the open market, had not played a great part in holding things together. Some might say holding things back, but even a few of those will be glued to the screen. I wonder how it all turns out.’
“It takes a clean digital signal from your USB port and converts it to a warm analog music. And it looks as badass as it sounds.”
“Mr. Grubel may be counting on a return to the casino but if regulators have their way, it’s door will soon be shut.”
Or, you can try an extended metaphor, as Jia Tolentino from The New Yorker did. Her article on ‘Instagram face’ opens by describing the subject as ‘a face that looks like its made out of clay’. It ends with the following metaphor.
"If you worship perfection, you cannot appreciate the beauty in wreckage—on Instagram, the scavenger, too, will always find something to polish. But for now, this face is a compromise, a negotiation between what we might be and what we can't yet know. It is a girl face, of course, a sister to Audrey Hepburn's and Brigitte Bardot's; it exists at a threshold of time, a lovely mask, as we wait to see what happens next."
“’Last year, in Abu Dhabi, a man spent fourteen million dollars at a public auction for a license plate that had only one digit: ‘1.’ ‘I bought it because it’s the best number,"’ he said.”
There are a million different ways to start and end your articles. Experiment with different approaches and see what best suits your content and your brand overall. But if you take anything away from this article, remember this: a good lede invites you to the party, and a good kicker makes you wish you could stay longer.
This article was first published in November 2009 and we updated it, with input from Sian Cooper and the rest of the writing team in September 2024.