Lead Exercise
4 09 2014The article that I used for this exercise is “Who Wins in the Name Game,” by Cody C. Delistraty from The Atlantic. The lead features the writer at a party in Paris. A French girl exchanges a few flirty looks with him, then comes over to talk. He tells her that his name is Cody, and she tries to pronounce it without much success. She is pretty much turned off to him then, and the “nut graf” explains that “the ability to pronounce someone’s name is directly related to how close you feel to that person.” Delistraty then launches into an article about how our names affect the schools we can get into, the jobs we can get, and how long it takes us to get promoted.
I thought that the lead was incredibly effective. As a 21-year-old, middle-class, white reader, the lead put me into a position where I could see a fairly common-place name, Cody, as a liability. The writer was able to set a scene in probably fewer than 50 words, and I immediately was able to know what the article was going to be about. It grabbed my attention because it set up the writer as a character, a kind of underdog who couldn’t get something that he wanted. I especially liked how the writer came back to the initial anecdote at the end. Apparently, the woman’s name was “Edwige” (cough Hedwig), which both the writer and I found to be funny. The ending anecdote wrapped up the whole story very nicely, and, together, the beginning and end put me in both the position of the discriminator and the person discriminated against.
You could rewrite the lead a few different ways, although I really like this one the way that it is. You could start off with some sort of word association game, by maybe listing off a bunch of names and allowing the reader to let their first impressions fly through their heads. You could start off with some sort of anecdote about a person with a weird name (although that seems to be what the author kind of did). I’ve seen similar stories a couple of times where the writer talks about how he changed the name on his resume from his first name (Kelly or Brook or something) to his more-masculine middle name and instantly got more interviews.
Here is my alternative lead:
What’s in a name? Despite Juliet’s famous assertion that “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” names actually can play a huge role in predetermining the schools we get into, the jobs we apply for, where we get hired, the people we date. They can even influence the cities we live in, the people we befriend, and the products we buy.
Categories : Feature Writing