Almost everybody likes a mystery.

Most of us want to be in on secrets or to hear the latest gossip about people we know.

Expectations and questions about what happens next engage readers and put power in almost any kind of journalism – print, digital and online. 

Editors and publishers now see readers, rather than advertisers, as their primary customers and sources of revenue, says Karen Shiau-Jing Ding an internet startup entrepreneur. Deliver the right content for the right audience and the advertisers will follow.

Here’s a cleverly-written example of creating readers’ interest and expectation from Clare Ansberry in The Wall Street Journal:

Word oozed out earlier this month. 

The news quickly spread. 

Worries softened. 

Aldi supermarkets had lowered the price of butter. 

Note her word choices: Word oozed out. The news quickly spread. Worries softened. 

Crime stories are splendid subjects to build expectation as in this opening by Bob Paynter of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Although you may know that I advocate for short, punchy sentences, his 77-word opening to “A Cold-Blooded Liar” is exceptional:

It’s no surprise that John George Spirko, Jr. landed in a Toledo-area jail cell in early October 1982 … just months after being paroled from a Kentucky prison for murder … just days after getting the snot beat out of him in a bloody bar fight by a gang of bikers … and just hours after waving a sawed-off shotgun in Theresa Fabbro’s face in a failed attempt to track down and take revenge on his attackers. 

Could you resist reading the rest of his story?

Note Paynter’s uses of time: months, days, hours.

As a newspaper reporter Meyer Levin wrote of the horrors of Buchenwald and other Nazi death camps.

“My mind, after this week, faintly reflects their minds. It is a composite image of trains running three-tracked into smoking crematoriums, of a German officer, playfully lining up Jewish children until they were precisely one head behind the other and then putting a single bullet through the line, of a woman holding her baby aloft over her head while savage police dogs ripped her apart, and through every image I see the brown, earnest undeniable eyes of a survivor who tells me this, and over each image is stamped the ever-recurring line, “I saw it with my own eyes.”

As gruesome as it is, you feel compelled to read on about the rest of what Levin saw.

In the  opening of my book, Letters From 12-Mile Creek, my sentences are purposely short and a little creek becomes a character in the story: 

It never stops. It never sleeps.

Most of the time, Twelve Mile Creek is more marvel than misery. It ambles along, taking its time, a benign, gurgling little stream.. 

But when heavy rains saturate its soil, it rages like a river. It swells and destroys dams. It floods homes and businesses and makes a mess of life.

If you live on the edge of a creek, you know the power it possesses to make your life miserable. 

Vivid words engage readers and build a following.

 When you build expectations you will grab your reader with your opening sentences. When we build a following our advertisers want to reach, we ensure our newspapers and digital editions will survive.

Next: The benefits of hand writing

The above will appear in The Art of Compelling Writing, Volume 3, which is already in the works. Volumes 1 and 2 are available at Amazon.com. Volume 3 will appear this year. These books were published to help editors like you teach your reporters how to write well.

Proceeds go to support adult literacy tutoring. You will help someone learn to read and write.

To comment or with questions, please write JerryBellune@yahoo.com.