Leads Strategies: Hanging On
Description
The author provides clues that prompt the reader to try to guess what is being described.
Published Example
From D.A. Bailey’s “Call of the Wild” in the July 1999 issue of Boys’ Life magazine:
Its body stretched flat in the water, the hunter swims toward the prey. One hop, and the hunter is out of the water, snatching its catch. Licking its lips, it prepares to devour its meal.
A ruthless killer? An unlucky victim? Nope. The hunter is a fluffy muskrat, looking more like a bedroom slipper than a dangerous predator. Its prey is an apple slice, hidden in an exhibit at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC.
Discussion
Rather than coming right out and saying that this article is about a fluffy muskrat, the author keeps the reader hanging on, leading him or her to wonder what is being written about.
Student Example
From Iris’s report, in which she combines Hanging On with Imagine:
Try to imagine that you are on a trip in South America. You are on a tour of a Brazilian rain forest and you see a spotted animal and a black animal. You think the spotted animal is a jaguar but you’re not sure. Can you guess what kind of animal the black one is? Well, as you might have guessed, the black animal is not a black panther. But it is a female jaguar. Female jaguars are usually always black. In fact, a jaguar cub usually will have a black mother and a spotted father.