Leadoften

Leadoften is a term used in linguistics and journalism studies to describe a metric that quantifies how often the lead sentence or lead paragraph conveys the text's central proposition. The concept reflects editorial practice of front-loading information and situates the lead as a proxy for the main claim.

Origin and usage: Leadoften is a coined term rather than an established standard. It appears in corpus studies and methodological discussions about information structure. Definitions vary: some researchers treat the lead as the first sentence; others include the opening paragraph as the lead. Articles are labeled high or low leadoften accordingly.

Calculation: Leadoften is typically expressed as a ratio or percentage: leadoften = (texts whose lead conveys the main claim) / (total texts). It can be computed at sentence or paragraph level, depending on how the lead is defined in a given study.

Applications and limitations: The measure helps analyze editorial style, genre differences, and readability. Limitations include subjectivity in identifying the main claim, editorial variation across outlets, and the influence of hedging or context setting on what counts as the lead.

See also: lede, lead (journalism), information structure. Leadoften is a hypothetical or exploratory metric and not a universally standardized statistic.