Don't bury the lead

Do you find yourself hovering over a thread title to read its preview but then moving on because the author didn’t get round to making their point?

There’s a saying in journalism “Don’t bury the lead”, meaning tell the reader the point of your story straight away. Don’t expect them read several paragraphs to discover what it’s about.  It’s a really nice feature of this forum that hovering your mouse pointer over a thread title will pop up a preview of its first few lines.  It’s especially welcome as the forum has its regular episodes of running slow, and you can browse without the delay of loading up new pages.  So it’s a pity that so many of us don’t think of it when composing a post.

I don’t mean to moan, or be critical of people’s posting style.  It doesn’t always cross my mind what text will appear in the preview, but folk can probably get more reaction to their posts if they jumped straight in by fleshing out the issue in their thread title instead of filling up the length of the preview with off-topic stuff about how long they’ve had their car, why they bought it and where they like to drive in it.  It’s a cool forum feature and I recommend we help ourselves by using it more.

Good point Martin

A close friend, now divorced ironically, had a wife who worked in marketing. She studied the subject to degree+ level and knew how to get results. 

Best advice ever - always state your point and what you want - pontification is for people who will irritate confuse and frustrate.

 

I’m puzzled - Martin said “It’s a really nice feature of this forum that hovering your mouse pointer over a thread title will pop up a preview of its first few lines”.

How? I tried this on the new post area and nothing shows, except the location of that post. ( I use Google as a browser with W10 as an operating system.) - I don’t use Edge as it’s full of ads, and emails using Edge also do not permit attachments, And yes- I am aware of the limitations of Google! I agree that what Martin said it would be useful, but for me - it doesn’t work.

Otherwise, I tend to agree, there’s a current thread that caught my eye - asking ‘What is the sweet spot of a Mk3?’, As an occasional reader, and sometime poster on miata.net, the expression ‘Sweet Spot’ refers to that point where the best torque and horse power is available (oft used as a reference as to why a six speed is better than a five speed box)

So I loaded it, only to find out the post was about the best points about a Mk3 to lead to a buy, about which I drew my own opinion, but deffered from giving an answer. Why didn’t the poster say that in his header?
First time I’ve ever heard the term “What should I look for when buying a Mk3?” described as a ‘sweet spot’!

I don’t know why it’s not working for you Gerry.  Maybe an ad blocker or popup blocker is stopping it. 

I just checked the 3 browsers I have on this machine (Edge, Firefox and Internet Explorer) and they all work.