I admire Amy Vickers‘ command of communications secret #3: Make your point before you prove your point. Her proficiency is on display in an Op Ed she had placed in the Boston Globe last month. Called “Lawn Binge,” the piece compares America’s wasteful household irrigation to an alcohol abuse problem. The piece demonstrates that nature protection and pollution control experts can “open up” their issue to a wide audience without “dumbing it down.”

Here’s how she does it:

By volume, America’s biggest drinking problem isn’t alcohol: It’s lawn watering.

Home lawn and landscape irrigation consumes an average of more than 8 billion gallons of water daily, equivalent to 14 billion six-packs of beer. One-third of all residential water use in the United States is devoted to irrigation, estimates the US Environmental Protection Agency. Many cities and some states in the Southeast and Southwest, the country’s fastest growing regions and those with the tightest water supplies, report that 50 percent of their residential water use is outdoors, primarily for lawns.

She makes her point in the opening sentence — clearly labeling excess water use as a problem. Then she backs up that claim with the facts.

Had she not included the first paragraph, most newspaper readers wouldn’t have known whether to interpret 8 billion gallons daily as a good thing or bad thing. Facts without context are meaningless. But on the other hand, if she hadn’t included the facts in the second paragraph, many Globe readers would have dismissed the claim as unsubstantiated.

She made her point before she proved her point. She told the reader what the facts meant, then the she told them the facts.

Good job, Amy! Thanks for letting me know about your piece.

Read: Lawn Binge, Boston Globe, June 10, 2007