profile

Emily Cretella / Cursive Content

How to Nail the First Line of Any School Content 📍🔨

Published about 1 month ago • 1 min read

July 2026

The Story Starter

Reader,

Every piece of marketing you share—blog posts, emails, website pages—has to grab attention fast. If you don’t hook your audience right away, you’ve likely lost them.

The secret? Mastering your lede.

Your lede—the intro of your content—is key to pulling your audience in and getting them to care. It sets the tone, answers their biggest question (“Why should I care?”), and keeps them reading. Done right, it makes your marketing impossible to ignore.

​This week's blog shows you how to craft ledes that connect with parents, students, and your community.

Whether you’re writing a blog, a school website page, or even an email, this guide will help you create intros that stick.

This week's storytelling tip:

Always start your content with your audience in mind. What’s the one thing they need to know right now?

Lead with that to grab their attention and make them want more.

Resources on-demand:

Want to learn exactly how to win over dream families with breakthrough school storytelling? You need our on-demand Audience-First Storytelling Kit.

See you next week!

-Emily

Remember: as a Cursive Insider, you have access to our FREE Resource Library​
​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | P.O. Box 854, North Haven, CT 06473

Emily Cretella / Cursive Content

School Storyteller for Independent Schools

Cursive Content helps independent school marketers tell powerful stories that attract dream families, increase inquiries & enrollment, strengthen communities, and grow school influence. Subscribe for weekly content and storytelling tips!

Read more from Emily Cretella / Cursive Content

August 2026 The Story Starter Reader, Last week, I wrote about how AI reads your website (short version: in pieces, not top to bottom, and your Google ranking doesn't guarantee it likes what it finds). This week answers the question: does this mean we have to write differently? Yes. Just not the way people assume. You don't need to start writing like a spec sheet. What needs to change is where the specific facts — dates, numbers, formats — live on the page. This week's post walks through...

about 3 hours ago • 1 min read

August 2026 The Story Starter Reader, If you've been here a while, you know that I've been sharing school website copywriting best practices for ... quite some time. (Decades, actually.) Which is why this week's topic is so important. It's about AI search — and specifically, how AI reads your website and determines what (and if) it will share. I spent the last few weeks down a research rabbit hole, and I'll be sharing my findings, thoughts, and tips in a series of blog posts. This week's is...

7 days ago • 2 min read

August 2026 The Story Starter Reader, "Yes, that's definitely on our list ... we just need time to focus on it." Sound familiar? The idea of putting a new marketing endeavor (like digital advertising) "on our list" is both comforting and dangerous. Comforting because we acknowledge that it is important -- but dangerous because it's SO EASY to keep pushing it off until next week, next semester, or next school year. This is why I'm incredibly excited to share something exclusively with Cursive...

15 days ago • 1 min read