A chorus line has one job
to be worth hearing again. Not once, four times, because that is how many times the average chorus gets sung. Most first-draft chorus lines fail that job in a small number of ways that are easy to name once you have heard them, and the Hook Test is those ways, eight at a time. Two lines, both plausible, pick the one that earns its repeat, see why, next pair. Two minutes, no account, at write.mainact.app/hook-test.
The pairs are built so that the wrong line is often the more attractive one on a first read. That is deliberate and it is the whole lesson. "I still have feelings deep inside for you" reads as a chorus line; it has the shape and the sincerity. "I left the porch light on for you" is the one that survives, because a named feeling wears out on the second repeat and an object you can see keeps its charge. The test is not asking which line is prettier. It is asking which one you would still want to sing on the fourth pass.
The moves the pairs test, in the order most writers learn them: a concrete image over a named feeling; a verb in the line so the singer has something to do each time; a specific moment over an eternal promise (forever is the most repeated word in pop and the least specific); open vowels on the held notes; the title on the last word, where the melody holds; an unresolved tension that gives the ear a reason to come back; trusting an image instead of explaining it; a fresh detail over a familiar one; a statement over a rhetorical question; stresses that land on the beat; a named place over a generic one; a surprising pair over an obvious opposite; room to breathe; second person; and commitment, because a hedge that undercuts the line once kills it by the third repeat.
How we score it is worth a paragraph, because most free tests lie here. We have no live population yet, and a percentile against invented humans would be a fabricated number. So the baseline is a chance guesser. Each pair carries the probability that a naive picker chooses the earning line, below one half when the wrong line is the more attractive one, and your percentile is the share of guessers who would score below you on the same eight pairs, computed exactly. The result page says "of guessers" and never "of songwriters." Six of eight beats more than eighty percent of guessers on every draw; four of eight beats fewer than seventy. Live percentiles arrive when enough writers have taken it, and they will be labelled as such.
The result is a score, a tier, and one prescription: the craft move you missed first, in bank order, with the reason. That prescription is what the daily session would open on if you signed up, which is the point of the test. A number tells you where you stand; the move tells you what to do tomorrow.
The drill on this page is the natural companion
ninety seconds of titles. A title is a chorus line that has to earn its repeat before there is a melody to hide behind, so it is the fastest way to practise the same judgement the test measures.
