Narrative Piece

The following piece is from today's edition of the New York Times. It's by Jere Longman and Lynn Zinser and can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/sports/05marathon.html?ref=todayspaper.

This article is about Sunday's New York City Marathon winners and it does a few things well. The first thing is that it doesn't tell you who the winners are right away - it draws you into the story and makes you want to keep reading to find out. The following, as we read in Chapter 9, also made the piece stronger:

1) Descriptive Technique - the piece used description without being overbearing, and it worked really well. It also wasn't sexist - it didn't focus too much on the fact that the winner had just gone through a pregnancy, and it gave a lot of focus to the men's race as well.

2) Use of Narrative Technique - I could really picture the route and these women running down it as I read the piece, and that's a huge part of why it's so effective. I was there. The writers were very successful in how they set up the scene. Dialogue was used in a few appropriate places to make it seem more real and more like a story. The scene was set and the plot established, and the reader wanted to find out what happened. It was done very well.

I really liked this article. I thought the story was carried about well, though I wonder if the lede could have been a little stronger. It drew me in, but I wonder if it could've been stronger. I don't know if it's acceptable to put the runner's respective countries in the paragraph following the lede, but if it is I think that that would've allowed it to flow better.