Ax your anecdotal lede and GTTP. (Symposium Secrets to Stronger Editorials).

They are a sin against journalism but they sure brighten my mornings. I like to read them aloud to the family at breakfast.

The sun didn't pierce the mist until nearly noon in this remote, hardscrabble hamlet where muddy pickups and plaster garden gnomes inhabit every yard.

"So, what's this story about?" I ask aloud.

"Fog!" ventures the son.

"Good garden gnome salesman!" guesses the wife.

"Shows what you know," I reply, and then scan a few grafs down when it all snaps into focus:

For the residents of Delbert Hollow, it was anything but a normal day as word spread that one of its own was a hero in one of the most unusual raids of the war against Iraq.

I call them "weather ledes" because they invariably provide an account of the atmospheric conditions on whatever day Something Has Happened in some foreign clime. Eventually, but only after a thunderous throat-clearing exercise that often occupies several paragraphs and sometimes lasts well into the jump, the writer gets to the point.

Atmospheric detail has its place: on postcards to mom from balmy Caribbean ports.

Unless it's a story or about a hurricane, tornado, or opening-day baseball in Baltimore, resist the urge to paint the sky and do the reader a favor: GTTP. Get To The Point.

I'm not against color or charming detail. I embrace the telling quote. I swoon for metaphor and the occasional provincialism. No desert bazaar should be without vendors lifting goats by the hindquarters for customers to examine, but please, please, please, tell me what we're doing there first.

The fix is usually simple. In the breakfast example, isn't it a more engaging lede that tells the reader:

From house to house in rural Delbert Hollow went the word Tuesday: Fob Rimkus, who grew up down the muddy road, was a hero in a cunning military raid in faraway Iraq.

Simple, elegant, and tooth-pickingly provincial. And it's classic GTTP.

You can make it even better. Plant a signpost to a good angle in the story: "... who grew up down the muddy road and was well-known hereabouts for his uncanny luck...."

Now you've whetted the appetite for a double tale--how Fob got to be a hero there and how he earned his reputation back in the hills.

Ledes work when they telegraph information, arouse an appetite for what's coming, and set an engaging tone.

Anecdotal ledes often fail on all three counts. Weak writers can delude themselves that they're onto something when they spin out a few grafs in which the subject of their story plops his brown penny loafers on his well-worn desk, reaches for a Marlboro Light, and is soon enveloped by a halo of white smoke in his untidy office, piled high with unread newspapers that bore him to death by the end of the first paragraph.

It doesn't GTTP. Worse, it isn't very interesting.

Apply this test: Would you turn your head to see the sight you're describing in the anecdotal lede? Would you cross the street to see it? Would you talk about it at the dinner table that night? If the answer is no, scrap it and try again.

Same story, two different anecdotal ledes:

Louie Whalen barked at a customer on Monday, quarreled with his boss Tuesday, and demanded a divorce from his wife on Wednesday, but it was Thursday before coworkers understood his rage.

Not bad, but it doesn't turn my head. How about:

Louie Whalen was wiping blood from the ax when he stepped out of the elevator and, ignoring the screams of coworkers, stalked down the hall to his supervisor's office, where he expected to find his boss waiting to tryst with his wife.

Now that, I'd watch (from a distance, if I get a choice).

The first case requires us to assume that Louie is interesting. The second shows us he is. Not only that, it plants a signpost to the combustible element of the story, the part that explains "Why?"

People are in a hurry these days. Things are popping at them all the time, trying to get their attention. The writer who ignores that fact does so at personal peril.

One of the best ledes in history was penned in 1883 by novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. It was the first sentence of Treasure Island and it went like this:

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesay, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17--, and go back to the time when my father kept the "Admiral Benbow" inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

OK, it's a little long, but it's a workhorse.

In 90 words--without a weather report--Stevenson introduced us to four major characters, including the narrator. He told us that there was an island that not only yielded treasure but for some reason still has some left. He told us that the party survived.

He told us that the experience was so dazzling that the party decided it should be chronicled. He told us that the narrator was young and sprung from humble roots.

And he telegraphed that the old seaman was a mysterious old bird and did it with a voice that augured trouble.

In short, it is a lede that would provide me no material at the breakfast table. I'd be too busy reading the next graf.

Mark Washburn is TV columnist for The Charlotte Observer and a former state editor of The Miami Herald. E-mail [e-mail]