DON'T USE HOOKS - just don't
Why I hate hooks and why they are useless
Introduction
Hooks are something that every single teacher in primary, middle, and high schools, across all subjects and grade levels, among all countries in the world that teaches English writing in school, stresses about. But this is inherently ridiculous and ludicrous. Why?
Before any further discussion on why hooks are useless and even harmful for your writing, it is important to understand one thing. Why does people use hooks in the first place?
Hooks are used to grab the reader’s attention in an article. So, it often appears in the front of the article, at the start of the first paragraph to be exact. It can be a short witty retort, or can be in the form of an anecdote. It can be a shocking statistic, or it can be a rhetorical questions aimed to make the readers think.
Teachers will often say things like, “you need to catch your reader’s attention in the first place!” Or they might say things like, “don’t lose your reader!”
Admittedly, it is true that we shouldn’t lose our readers. However, hooks are not the way to do it. In order to understand why hooks are useless, we need to do some case studies. So, in what cases will we be using a hook?
I think there are three cases:
1) in a formal exam (e.g. Paper 1 for English Literature in the IBDP final exam)
2) in an academic paper written without a time constraint
3) in all other kinds of published work of English (i.e. blogs, newsletter articles, columns in a magazine)
Formal Examinations
The first case is in a formal exam with time constraints. And why hooks are useless in this case?
It is simple. The examiner is literally forced to read your essay, anyway. Their job is simply to read the student’s essay and give it a grade. In other words, whether your essay attracts their attention or grab their eyes on first look doesn’t matter, because they are going to read it thoroughly anyway.
It is important to notice that a hook in this situation is quite dangerous. If you make a joke and the examiner doesn’t get it, you’re doomed! If you ask a rhetorical question that the examiner has seen a lot of times before, it is going to backfire. Not to mention the fact that the examiners literally look through thousands of essays on the same topic in 3 days. There is nothing new to catch their attention!1
Writing a good hook takes time, and you are working with a time constraint. Why bother with a hook that might backfire? Why not dive straight into the content and prove your ability with that? Considering the stakes of these standardized examinations, hooks should be avoided.
Essays with no time constraints
The second case is when you are writing an essay for homework, for example. In this case, you should not use a hook, UNLESS your teacher has made it clear that without a hook he/she will deduct points.2
Compare the following opening lines of two analytical essay written on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature:
As the pioneering text of the transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s meditative rhapsody Nature describes a beauty in nature that transcends the physical, inspiring his audience to seek in nature not what can be seen and touched, but felt...3
Go forth and find it, and it’s gone…4
Now, let me ask you a question. Imagine you’re a English teacher (who permits hooks but don’t require the usage of them), and you are reading the opening lines of two of your students’ works. Which one would you prefer to see?
The first one! You are a teacher, you are busy! You don’t want to be confused and dazzled by some sort of witty statements that you student copied or crafted somehow that doesn’t catch your attention. You literally have no idea about what is the student going to say after their first sentence in the second example.
Unlike the second example, the first one provides a sense of coherence, or clarity; the first moment your teacher sees your essay, they know what they are up for. That both of the examples are only 1 sentence.
Hooks, in this setting is more about how your words tie together. Of whether you want your readers to be confused, angered, and messed up by something that only you think of as smart, or do you want your readers to have a sane and clear mind of where you are going in the first moment.
Academic writing, in both of these cases, demands coherence and clarity.
Casually Published Articles
The third case is in regard to all other form of published writing we do. For those kinds of articles and essays, the thing that attracts the audience is the information, the idea, the content, the knowledge, and the thinking presented in the text.
Generally, if not for the sake of entertainment, the reader will want to get something from your article in the shortest amount of time. This means that you need to deliver the content as quickly and as clearly as possible in this society that lacks attention. Since that the longer you delay the key point, the higher the chance that your audience is going to click off your article. I would suggest, based on common sense, that instead of getting into some empty philosophical discussion in the introduction, just get straight to the point.
If we use the examples above, the first example is packed with content, while the second one is quite meaningless without context.
Now, there is a case to be made that a hook will show your style and voice to the audience. But since: a) your first priority is to deliver quality content, and b) voice and style can be integrated into the text itself.
As David Perell puts it in his “Ultimate Guide to Writing Online”5:
Your voice is about how you write, not what you write… A unique voice gives you flexibility and freedom.
And clearly, a hook is about what you write and a hook carries a rigid form sometimes.6
Summary
Don’t use hooks because:
they waste time; it takes time to write a good hook, but the return is diminishing
they are risky; since they might not resonate with the reader
they are useless; your audience will be more interested in the content not the form
they hinders your personal style/voice; because they often appears with rigid formulas
Catch them with your content.
For this, if your teacher requires you to use a hook for homework, then do it! But let me tell you a secret, just don’t use the hooks when you are taking those standardized examinations!
Credit to Dr. Mark Seeley (PhD)
As a quote from Emerson’ essay
https://perell.com/essay/the-ultimate-guide-to-writing-online/
Teachers like to teach hooks like some sort of special ingredient that will suddenly make your writing better. And they’ll say that it is based on some sort of formula. NOT TRUE.