Do You Make These Mistakes in English?" Sherwin Cody School ad, The Mentor January 1922 (leaf 41)
The pattern
This still is filed under If-then promise.
Define
A conditional contract: if you do this, you get that. The sentence can be tested against the reader's own case.
Mechanism
Specificity does the persuading. The if names the action. The then names the outcome. Hedging kills it.
Verdict
We can name both the action and the result without adjectives
Why it works
The headline works because of the word These - it promises a finite, listed set of errors, which turns an unbounded anxiety into something a reader believes can be inspected and closed. The opening then demonstrates rather than asserts: four specific mistakes, printed in bold inside the text, let the reader self-diagnose in the first ten seconds, and anyone who recognises one of their own is already sold. The stakes are raised by a single line about people being too polite to tell you, which makes the problem invisible and therefore un-fixable without help. The mechanism section then reframes the whole category from study to habit, which dissolves the real objection - that adults will not go back to grammar school - and the fifteen-minutes-a-day number makes the commitment auditable. The ask is only a free book, so the page never has to defend a price.
Steal this when
You sell education, training or correction to adults who are quietly embarrassed about a gap. Lead with a finite list of specific named errors they can check themselves against, reframe the work as habit rather than study, and ask only for the free explainer.
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