Hook lab
The shortest unit of persuasion in this plugin, and the one with the worst failure characteristics. At eight words a wrong choice has nowhere to hide: there is no second sentence to qualify it, no proof block underneath it, and no paragraph in which the reader forgives it. A page in the wrong register can still be read. A hook in the wrong register is simply not read.
No Conversion Brief, no gate
conversion-page-build stops and sends you to ../audience-research/SKILL.md when no brief exists,
and it is right to: a whole page argued at an assumed buyer is a week of work aimed at nobody. This
skill deliberately does not do that. Someone asking for three subject-line variants is not asking to
commission a research document, and requiring one before answering would retire the skill from the
request it exists for. ../copy-sweeps/SKILL.md refuses the same gate for a related reason; the
habits that replace the brief are different there, because improving a claim someone else made and
inventing one from nothing are different acts.
Read the brief when there is one. Under this vault's filing that is
03 Projects/<Project>/_Research/[C] Conversion Brief — *.md; elsewhere, whichever folder holds the
research. Three lines of it matter here: the Register, the ranked Problems, and the
voice-of-customer phrases. The last is the one people skip and the one that shows: a hook built
from customer wording outperforms a hook built from company wording for the mundane reason that the
reader recognises the first as a description of himself.
With no brief at all, still run. Two habits do the load-bearing part of its job.
- Say which register you are writing in, in the deliverable, before the lines. Register is
normally inherited rather than chosen (
../audience-research/SKILL.mdstates why once). When nothing was inherited you are choosing it, and an unlabelled choice is one nobody can correct. Name it, name what in the request implied it, and let the reader overrule you in one word. - No hook invents a specific. A number, an interval, a named customer, a share, a rate — if the
business has not stated it, it does not go in a line. This is the single most likely place in the
whole plugin for a fabrication to enter, because specificity is what makes a hook work and the
fastest way to get it is to make it up. Write
NOT ESTABLISHED — <what would close it>in the slot instead; the discipline is stated in full in../audience-research/SKILL.md.
Register decides which of the eight is available, not only how it sounds
Eight types: outcome · time · effort · callout · contrarian · pain · mechanism · transformation.
Five registers: Conservative B2B (DACH) · Technical / industrial · Consumer / lifestyle ·
Mission / nonprofit · Direct-response, defined in
../audience-research/references/register-profiles.md.
Crossing them is not a matter of turning the volume up or down. In one register a type's defining
move is unavailable altogether and something else has to stand in its place; in another the same
type is the strongest line on the page. references/hook-taxonomy.md holds all forty crossings,
each with the line it produces and what the register did to the move.
The procedure
- Name the surface and the register. Hero line, email subject, ad first line, social opener,
button label — the surface sets a hard limit that no amount of craft negotiates around, and it
binds before register does.
references/headline-formulas.mdopens with those limits. - Name the one thing the line has to claim. One. If two things are competing for the slot, the page needs two sections, not a longer hook. Take it from the brief's ranked problems, or ask exactly one question to get it.
- Pick three types deliberately from
references/hook-taxonomy.md— read the register's row under each, not the whole file. Three, because all eight produces forty lines, and forty lines is not a choice offered to the client, it is a decision handed back to them unmade. - Build each into a sentence with
references/headline-formulas.md. Step 3 chooses the claim and step 4 chooses the sentence; that split is the entire boundary between the two reference files, and each states its own side of it. - Cut to the surface limit, then read the survivors aloud. A line that needs a breath in the middle is two lines. A line whose meaning arrives only at the last word will be truncated exactly there.
- Deliver five to seven, each labelled with its type, and recommend one. The label is what lets the client reject an angle rather than a wording, which is the disagreement worth having.
The quick lane
Most requests here are one line long: punchier headline, give me a few subject lines, what should the button say. Run steps 1, 3, 4 and 6 and skip the rest. Three variants from three different types beats seven from one, and the reason to say which types they are is that the client usually knows which angle is right and cannot name it until he sees two that differ.
If the request is to improve a line that already exists, read it first for which type it is
currently attempting. Half the time the line is a good angle executed badly, and the fix is one
construction swap in references/headline-formulas.md rather than a new set.
Where this stops
- Not the hero section. A hero is a compressed argument in which a subhead, a proof strip and a
button each carry part of the load, and what that section has to accomplish is decided in
../conversion-page-build/references/section-playbooks.md. What comes out of here is the line that section needs. A headline handed back on its own is not a hero handed back. - Not the paragraph underneath. Once the line is settled and the copy around it needs work, that
is
../copy-sweeps/SKILL.md. - Not an offer repaired by phrasing. A line that refuses to sound like anything usually has
nothing standing behind it. Say that, and go to
../offer-architect/SKILL.md, instead of producing a twelfth variant — which is the request this skill is most easily talked into.
Output
The lines, each tagged with its type and, where it matters, the surface it was cut for. One
recommendation with the reason. Any slot left as NOT ESTABLISHED shown as it stands rather than
filled, so the gap is visible to whoever can close it. If the register was inferred rather than
inherited, that sentence goes at the top, not in a footnote.