For most audiences you have to be able to make your point in a single sentence. Everything else in the op-ed is the carrier, but the maximum impact comes from that one sound-bite sized sentence of payload.
Kos is actually good at this - most of his front page comments look like throw-aways, but in fact they're very distilled one-two punches nailing a point or two.
One one I'm working on at the moment includes some talky fluff with comments from Greenspan and others, and a 'So why is it that economists are so very bad at managing money?'
