What's the best way to erase and reinstall Lion?

I'm a little confused by the various posts I've read about erasing and reinstaling lion. 
My MBP is about 4 years old.  I upgraded to lion last summer and it never worked great, but over the last 3-6 months its been dragging.  I want to start fresh.  I've uploaded all of my personal files to a sky drive and then copied all of my extremely irreplaceable photos to two other hard drives.  Now I'm just fuzzy about my next step.
I've read I need to make a boot disk, or a thumb drive or I can do it right from my system.  I don't care which way or what I need, but I want it fresh with no chance of curroption.
Thanks for any and all direction.
Josh

While we all have MacBooks in this forum most of us don’t run Lion. There's a Lion Support Community where everybody has Lion. You should also post this question there to increase your chances of getting an answer. https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.7_lion

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