We’ve already talked about what a nut graph is and why it’s important. Now, I’m going to give you the step-by-step leading to and through your nut graph creation:
- Come up with a killer headline. This is what attracts people to read your story.
- Create an interest-grabbing lead. What’s exciting or interesting about your topic?
- Create your nut graph. Give readers the 5 Ws — who, what, when, where, and why. Throw how in, if appropriate.
- Continue the body of your article
- Wrap it all up in a conclusion.
That’s really A-B-C structure of any article, and you can see where the nut graph comes in. Use it to give readers reason to read further, and do it well enough so that they will.
We’ll elaborate more on each of these points as we cover article writing, but for now, as an exercise… Come up with a topic, an angle, a great headline, a lead, and a nut graph. Your topic can be something you know about and have researched, or it can be something you’d like to know more about.
I’d love to see what you’ve done! If you’re not too shy, paste your work into a comments box and I’ll critique it for you. No matter how good you think you are, a second set of eyes is always better.
