Burying the Lede

Amongst journalists, “burying the lede’ is an idiom meaning that you place the really important (but often inconvenient) news far down in the article. For example, if you don’t like a particular political candidate, you might write first about the size of her crowd, then the fact that the sound system went down, and further that some of the attendees were drunk. But her bold call for election reform doesn’t show up until the 21st paragraph, by which point most readers will have fallen asleep. This way, you may be honestly reporting the news, but in such a way that you’re not giving help to a candidate you despise.

To one extent or another, all of us bury the lede. While it is immoral and unethical to tell untruths or to omit necessary information, there is often a case for leaving some stuff to the end.

Let’s take an Appeal Brief, for example. The rules, as well as good practice, require that you lay out the good, the bad and the ugly about your case. Of course, the other guy is expected to do the same. But although the Appellant’s Brief and the Respondent’s Brief will contain mostly the same recitation of the relevant findings of the trial judge and the applicable law, the order of presentation is typically markedly different. If the other guy is going to try to make hay on a particular case or doctrine, you need to decide if you want to have a gunfight in your first paragraph, or if you’d prefer to make your own case and deal with your friend’s points just as a courteous afterthought. Sometimes you want to get it out front and centre, sometimes you want to bury the lede.

Appeal Briefs, Sales Proposals, White Papers, and Orthopedic Reports are really all the same– their purpose is to inform the reader in such a way that the reader ends up exactly where you intend him or her to be. Your job is to take the reader by the hand and lead him or her across the bridge of learning to the land of understanding.

The order of presentation, as well as the tone and the cadence, is critical to making sure the reader holds your hand all the way. And if there’s a rattlesnake at the end of the bridge, you may want to omit that detail until you get to the end where you will shoot the snake, because otherwise the nervous reader may be afraid to set out on the bridge with you in the first place.

Sometimes you want to get certain things out front and centre, and sometimes you need to bury the lede. Knowing when and how is what makes you a great communicator.

(Need some help with saying what you really need to say in the way you really need to say it? Let’s chat!)