I’m a nut for endings. Hellos are easy. Goodbyes are hard.

In our previous blog, Jim illustrated the importance and types of leads. I couldn’t agree more. Unless people read, nothing happens.

But if they read – what happens next? That’s an important question for us in strategic communications: What do you want them to do after they read? And if first impressions are lasting, lasting impressions can point to new beginnings.

So: How do you conclude? What do you want them to do after they read? Leave them with that lasting impression.

To pick up Jim’s examples:

Leads:
They can be simple and declarative: Call me Ishmael (“Moby Dick,” Herman Melville).
They can offer great insight to come: I am an invisible man (“Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison).
They can be playful and teasing: All this happened, more or less (“Slaughterhouse Five,” Kurt Vonnegut).
They can even get us all hot and bothered: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins (“Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov).
They can be intriguing: All children, except one, grow up.
Endings:
Endings are harder, because of the information, plot, analysis, understanding, and so forth that come between the lead and the ending:
Here are the endings to the leads presented above:

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. (Melville)

On the lower frequencies, I speak for you. (Ellison)

Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet? (Vonnegut)

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (Nabokov)

When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless. (Barrie)

The simplicity, insight, and intrigue that Jim rightly points out as the wellsprings of drama in the leads can become complex, resigned, and ambiguous by the endings.
But in every case, the lead points, like a vector, to the ending.
So, in our more business-like writing, the point is that the lead predicts the change after the story.
• If you begin with conflict, end with resolution
• If you begin with a question, end with an answer
• If you begin with a problem, end with the solution
• If you begin with “then and now,” end with “next.”
And today, always end by inviting reader response.
Sure, we sit down to write full of hope, purpose and energy. So leads must be great. But by the time we get to the end, exhausted and under deadline, we forget to tell our readers what they should think, do, or feel.
Please send us your best last sentences.

I’m a nut about first sentences.

In books. In journalism. In corporate journalism, though great openings can be harder to find there.

First sentences set a tone, convey a feeling, tell you what’s in store without telling you everything, or even anything.

They can be simple and declarative: Call me Ishmael (“Moby Dick,” Herman Melville).

They can offer great insight to come: I am an invisible man (“Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison).

They can be playful and teasing: All this happened, more or less (“Slaughterhouse Five,” Kurt Vonnegut).

They can even get us all hot and bothered: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins (“Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov).

Can you name the source of this great opening line? All children, except one, grow up. (The answer is at the end of this column.)

Journalism offers wonderful opportunities for opening lines. A friend of mine who works for the Philadelphia Enquirer sent me story not long ago. He started it this way:

Death came to Donora, a small steel town in western Pennsylvania, in the form of a black fog.

Kind of makes you want to find out what’s next, doesn’t it?

And that’s the point. The purpose of a first sentence is to fight like hell to convince you to get to the second sentence, then the third, and so on.

Corporate journalism can be that way, but too often it isn’t. Corporate leads get tangled up by politics and approvals, with boring details and people’s mind-numbing titles getting in the way of what might actually convince someone to read.

We have to fight back. You know the methods, but we can never remind ourselves enough:

1. Go for one sentence. Leave the rest for the next paragraph or copy block. Make it easy on your readers’ eyes.

2. See how short you can make it. One word and two word openings can really hit home.

3. Tell a story. An opening anecdote can pull us in to find out more.

4. Tease us. Make us care to find out exactly where you’re going.

5. Give us the news, vividly. Pick strong verbs and make every word count to offer the only sentence we need to learn the latest.

One of our favorite terrible stories over the years is a lengthy piece about a company’s executive team reviewing the results of management evaluations offered by employees.

The headline, one of the worst ever, is “Senior management meet offsite.” And if that weren’t bad enough, the lead misses the point altogether, dragging out the CEO and some kind of garble about going on a retreat to do something or other.

The lead should have been this:

Our managers finally got to hear what you think of them.

These are dramatic, worrisome times. Our communication is more important than ever, which means we should do everything we can to get people’s attention and keep it.

And if we do, then maybe one day soon we’ll see this good news lead in a company publication:

We’re back.

Oh, and what about that opening: "All children, except one, grow up"?

That’s the first line of "Peter Pan," of course.

Quick: What’s this line of poetry from?:

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other's eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

It’s the opening lines from “Praise Song For The Day,” Elizabeth Alexander’s poem composed for the Obama Inauguration.

It’s been maligned, unfairly, in my opinion. It takes several careful readings - or listenings - to appreciate some poems, some songs. I didn’t like many of the poems I return to often until after several readings.

I mean, for the first couple’s first dance, Beyoncé sang Etta James’ classic “At Last,” not some goddamned original composition by John Williams or Aaron Copland.

My advice: Read more poems at White House events, but go with the tried and true. Something familiar and appropriate for the occasion.

Something patriotic and historical: Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” (“The shot heard round the world”).

You want to strike the somber note of recession? Read Poe’s “The Raven.”

When will stocks approach 10,000? Quoth the Raven: “Nevermore.”

See what I mean? Who doesn’t like “The Raven”?

So, to communicators always looking for something “innovative” or creative, a piece of advice: Execute the tried and true really well: The profile, the interview, the narrative.

When John Kennedy asked Robert Frost to read a poem at his 1961 Inaugural, Frost was so familiar with it, having read it publicly hundreds of times, he could pretend that the cold January light was so bright for his old eyes he’d try to recall it by memory.

Here it is:

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.