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Consider your lead with the same care you’d take to make a good impression on a blind date. You wouldn’t show up at the door with a piece of parsley lodged between your front teeth.

In the same way, awkward word choices, poor storytelling and grammatical errors are the equivalent of a piece of misplaced muesli on a first date. Your readers might not give you a second chance. Here are some practices to avoid for upping your storytelling game when crafting a news lead:

• Make your first six-eight words count. Your reader should have an idea about what the story is about from reading these words.
• Look for a strong, accurate verb, which should be among those first six-eight words.
• Keep your lead less than 30 words. This is a generous word count. You can tell the story in 30 words or less. Trust me.
• Ban these words as your main verb in the lead: “met” for meeting stories and “spoke” for speech stories. What did the group do in the meeting? What did the speaker say?
• Look for any unusual elements and put them in the lead. Sure, the lady caused a wreck, BUT she was on her cell phone talking to her car insurance company when she ran her car into the back of truck.

Finally, be sure to brush your grammatical teeth when you edit a story. And then let your story smile.