Feature Leads vs. Summary Leads

As we all know, a summary lead is used for the basic hard news story and usually contains the five W's. However, there's much more to a feature lead. Sometimes a summary lead is used for a feature story but they focus on providing a preview or what's to come.
When a summary lead is not used in a feature story, there are four main types of feature leads used. An anecdotal lead tells the story in a short format with a beginning, middle and end; often making the ending a surprise. The writer must be sure to isolate the major point and find an anecdote that makes the point clear and simple. Narrative leads, on the other hand, typically lead into a story about a specific person or place.Take a look at this from the New York Times, for example, about fashion designer Anna Sui:

“IT’S survival of the fittest at this point,” the designer Anna Sui said cheerily last week, as she glided around her Garment Center workroom, a space crammed with vintage mannequin heads, clothes racks, books and trimmings. She was referring, of course, to the nine days of fall collections that begin on Friday in lofts around the city and at the Bryant Park tents."

Descriptive leads are used in stories that focus on a specific place or person/persons. They use only the details that will support the main point of the story. For instance, this lead used in the Baltimore Sun about the creator of the new prime time show "Dollhouse":

Fox has a new and improved dream girl for the Friday-night fantasies of teenage boys, and she arrives tonight wearing a hey-look-me-over, super-short dress - the perfect model of female allure and submission

Her name is Echo, and she's at the heart of a dark new drama, Dollhouse, created by Joss Whedon, the Hollywood producer who gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with Sarah Michelle Gellar, once upon a time.

I liked Buffy, and I even learned to find messages of female emancipation in its imitators, like James Cameron's Dark Angel, featuring Jessica Alba.
Some other feature leads include question leads, where a question is asked for the lead telling the readers information, quote leads, humorous leads and even newscast style leads as seen in our textbook.