Remove This First Line If You Want Your Readers to Stay Past Your Opening Sentence

04 Jun 2025 #writing

17ms. That’s how fast we decide whether to keep reading or move on.

Credits to “Smart Brevity.”

If we don’t hook readers with a headline and an opening line, they will move on to the next search result or the next post in the feed.

Yesterday, this opening line made me click away and open the next post in my RSS reader:

“In today’s fast-moving constantly-changing economy…”

And that’s not the first time I have found opening lines like that this week. “In our fast-paced world…” Nothing screams AI more than lines like those. Boooooring!

When was the last time the economy didn’t change? And the last time our world was slow?

Since we started doing accounting on pieces of clay in ancient Mesopotamia, the economy has been moving fast.

And since God said “let there be light” (or the Big Bang started. Choose your own adventure), our world has been moving fast.

There’s nothing surprising about “In today’s fast-paced blah blah blah.”

Start with blood or drama. Start with the unusual.

Remove the “in today’s blah, blah” part and keep the rest. You will have a decent opening line. And you won’t give away that you are using AI.

You only have a few seconds to hook readers before memes and cat pictures steal their attention. Make them count.