Research bank — Report intro paragraph
Research bank — Report intro paragraph
What an intro paragraph is for a report, brief, or decision note — not a wiki page, not a personal page.
Novelty note
Checked: Opening Moves Catalog (sentence-one moves for wiki pages); Opening Doors (paragraph-level doors; inventory fault, 2026-08-15); Intro QA (five tests for personal/political pages; nineteen-test grind killed 2026-08-19 because it did not converge); Claude intro-convergence intake 2026-08-19 (16 critic rounds, failures did not fall); owner strike 2026-08-13 that copular intros were not being executed. This lane is a different object: the first paragraph of a report that answers a question. Those files never named that object. Decision writing said “verdict in the first two sentences,” and that got executed as a list of findings. That is the gap.
Do not rerun the nineteen-test grind. Do not add a detector.
Subject in plain words
An intro paragraph tells the reader the answer to the question the piece was asked, in a few sentences that follow from each other. After it, they know the finding. They do not yet have the parts.
Ownership: half-owned. Everyone has seen an intro. The content here is which job it has, and which job it does not.
Claim ledger
| ID | Claim | Verdict | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | A news/report lead’s test is: can a reader stop here and still have what they came for. | S | Zamith, The American Journalism Handbook, Leads and Nut Grafs. Summary lead puts the essential information first. |
| C2 | A summary lead is a short paragraph (about two to three sentences), not a first sentence plus a list of parts. | S | Same source: leads are typically short and get to the point; 5 W’s and H live in the paragraph, not as an inventory of mechanisms. |
| C3 | The nut graf (if used) says what the story is about and where it is going. It does not start the evidence dump. | S | Same; also The Open Notebook, “Nailing the Nut Graf”. |
| C4 | This vault already named the failure mode: after a good first sentence, the paragraph delivers the page’s parts as a list. Parts belong in the body. The opening carries what the thing is, what it is for, and what it gives. | P | [vault] Opening Doors, “The inventory,” struck 2026-08-15. |
| C5 | A paragraph has one job. A list of true facts with no reasoning fails even when each sentence is locally true. | P | [vault] Intro QA, stacking test. Owner: “Reasoning is what I like more than facts.” |
| C6 | Each sentence has to connect to the one before without the reader building a bridge. | P | [vault] Intro QA, transition test. |
| C7 | ”Verdict in the first two sentences” is not permission to put finding one, then finding two, then finding three. The verdict is one answer. The reasons wait. | P | [vault] Writing Standards L99 plus today’s session: “Anthropic sometimes sends Fable requests to Opus 4.8” as sentence two of a report. |
| C8 | Announcing the intro (“here’s what we found,” “for several reasons”) is not an intro. | P | [vault] journal/2026-08-20-writing-normally.md. |
| C9 | A nineteen-test intro battery does not converge and should not be rebuilt. | S | [vault] journal/2026-08-19-intro-qa-cut.md; INTAKE-Claude-intro-convergence-2026-08-19.md (rounds 1–16, failures 12–24, not falling). |
| C10 | The write-act is: answer the question in a paragraph. Sentence two continues sentence one. Mechanisms wait for the body. | P | Follows C1–C6. Not a new test list. |
Gaps
- No accepted generated intro in the Positions domain (Intro QA cut). Out of scope here.
- No vault specimen of a report intro that the owner has accepted. This lane is the first naming of that object.
Terminology
- Lead / intro paragraph — the first paragraph. The reader can stop after it and have the answer.
- Inventory — the struck fault: sentence one is fine, then the parts arrive as a list.
- Body — where the parts, mechanisms, dates, and quotes live.