Controversial: Some Ways To Shorten A Long Lede

Here was one of the too-long ledes:


The decision was unanimous when the East Lansing  School Board voted to ban boys from playing on girls' team Wednesday night. The policy will ban boys from playing on the girls' field hockey, volleyball and softball teams. It takes effect immediately.

Why was it too long? It crammed too much info into the lede. But let's look at the layers of info: the first sentence gets to the main point: The decision was unanimous when the East Lansing  School Board voted to ban boys from playing on girls' team Wednesday night. It's the bare minimum a reader needs to know how things ended up.


Then, the second and third sentences elaborate on the main point by offering greater detail to the general bottom line, answering questions created by the main point like, how broad is the ban? When does it start? and better supporting the lede: The policy will ban boys from playing on the girls' field hockey, volleyball and softball teams. It takes effect immediately.

In short, the second and third sentences do what a nut graf is supposed to do. So, why not split the graf up by turning the first sentence into a lede, and the second and third sentences into a nut graf, like this:

The decision was unanimous when the East Lansing  School Board voted to ban boys from playing on girls' team Wednessday night.

The policy will ban boys from playing on the girls' field hockey, volleyball and softball teams. It takes effect immediately. 

Now, I'm not saying the answer to shortening a lede is always to split it in half. But you should look at what parts of a long lede do what a lede should, and if any other parts of a lede are better served as nut graf fodder.

With our newly-shortened lede, we can shorten it even further. Here's what we have now:

The decision was unanimous when the East Lansing  School Board voted to ban boys from playing on girls' team Wednessday night.

With any lede, we should look for echoes, where we repeat information. Here, we do that when we refer to the vote twice, once as a "decision" and again as "voted."  Let's rearrange word order to try to combine those refereces. What we have left is this:

The East Lansing School Board unanimously voted to ban boys from playing on girls' teams Wednesday night.

Now, we went from 21 words to 17 words, with no loss in meaning. Be sure to play with word order to shorten your work.