6 Proven Single-Sentence Openers

The 1 Chip Rule To Instantly Hook Your Reader

Ahoy, Digital Writers!

Have you ever tried to eat just 1 Ruffle?

It’s impossible.

Because once you have 1, you tell yourself, “Just 1 more.” And then you have 1 more, and you tell yourself again, “OK—just 1 more.” Until 12 minutes later, you’ve eaten the entire bag and you’re back in the kitchen opening a second one.

This is how readers should feel reading your work.

The 1 Chip Rule

One of the core principles we teach in Ship 30 for 30 is: you have to get readers to “eat the first chip.”

Because once they eat the first chip, they’re 10X more likely to eat the 2nd, the 3rd, and so on. Which means your headline, your first sentence, your formatting should all be optimized for the the reader to say, “Fine, one chip!” But unlike the guilt of eating an entire bag of chips, once the reader gets to the end of your essay, thread, or blog post, they’ll feel like you just gave them 6 pack abs!

If you do this, you’ll have readers flying through your work at record speed—and then clicking to read everything else you’ve written (because you don’t waste one second of their time!).

How, exactly, do you do this?

First, we’re going to give you 6 proven single-sentence openers (guaranteed to keep readers hooked).

And then, we’re going to show you how to train ChatGPT to generate hundreds of options for captivating single-sentence openers for you.

Let’s dig in!