Hook

A hook is the first line, first frame, or first three seconds, and it has exactly one job: buy the next line. It is not a summary and not a thesis. Joseph Sugarman put it bluntly in his 'slippery slide' idea: the sole purpose of the first sentence is to get you to read the second. Ogilvy's famous ratio, five times as many people reading the headline as the body copy, was about advertising headlines rather than opening lines, first frames, or the first three seconds of a video. Borrow the logic, not the number: the thing people meet first gets the most attention anything in the piece will ever get.

The reliable shapes are few. Open a loop ('We deleted 40% of our features. Revenue went up.'). State a specific, checkable number. Name the reader's exact frustration in their own words. Contradict something they believe. Or drop them mid-scene with no setup, the cold open. Concrete beats clever: 'I've reviewed 300 landing pages this year' outperforms 'Let's talk about landing pages.'

Gotcha: a hook writes a check the body has to cash. If the opener promises a story or a number and paragraph two wanders off, you have not written a hook, you have written clickbait, and the bounce shows up in your read-through rate. Write the hook last, once you know what the piece actually delivers, then make sure the payoff arrives inside the first screen.