Writing Essays - Where's The Pivotal Principle?

In every published essay and article, you'll find they all have one thing in common:
They all say something new to the reader.
But when writing instructors talk about essays and articles, they almost always overlook or ignore that fact. Yes, I know?that seems hard to believe, but it's true.
You see, teachers, critics, and textbooks get stuck on things like organization, introductions, conclusions, topic sentences, grammar, and word choice. In short, they get stuck on forms and pieces of essays and articles, and they lose focus of the idea of the essay or article as a whole, the content and idea level.
Even when they do sometimes talk about the main idea of an essay, however, they never get around to the newness aspect of the idea. Why? Because they can't define newness in a useful way?they haven't realized that what's new always depends on what is old, and they have no methodical process for capitalizing on that basic relationship.
Because of that , they haven't recognized that new ideas are often the reverse of old, already accepted ideas. And writing teachers and textbooks somehow miss the pattern of reverses that occur so often in published essays and articles.
Let me show you the content-level pattern of reverses that exists in all published essays:
FIRST, the OldView?the familiar, accepted view of some view?is stated.
SECOND, a NewView?always in opposition to, or a reverse of, the OldView?is stated almost immediately.
THIRD, support then follows.
For instance, the first paragraph of George Orwell's famous and widely published essay, "Politics and the English Language," talks about the degradation of the English language and the ugly politics of the British Empire, how the two interrelate and seem unbreakably bound together.
In the second paragraph, Orwell points out that "the process is reversible" and that improving the usage of the English language can improve English politics and thereby help save the British Empire. That's a clear OldView-to-NewView-Reversal pattern. And it's followed by supporting material.
Another good example is Carl Sagan's popular essay, "The Abstraction of Beasts." The very first sentence of the essay plainly states the OldView, the already accepted view:
" 'Beasts abstract not,' announced John Locke, expressing mankind's prevailing opinion throughout recorded history."
In the second paragraph, Sagan presents his Reverse NewView of that OldView by asking whether animals might be capable of abstract thought, though possibly less deeply or more rarely than humans. The rest of the essay provides (facts, reasoning, and speculation that support Sagan's NewView about animals actually thinking or abstracting.
A third example essay is Isaac Asimov's rather fun essay (for the first half, at least), "The Eureka Phenomenon." True, the fullness of Asimov's OldView and NevwView relationship does come in three stages. But he clearly talks first about his old problem, his OldView, of getting writer's block and then he explains how he learned to solve it by seeing an action movie, which is his NewView.
Next, he compares voluntary (consciously directed) and involuntary (automatic) thinking to voluntary (consciously directed) and involuntary (automatic) breathing. And in paragraphs ten and eleven he makes a formal statement of his NewView thesis. To support, he immediately begins telling the famous story of Archimedes solving the king's problem and finally running naked through the streets yelling that he found the solution ("Eureka! Eureka!").
What most of us usually don't remember after reading this essay is that Asimov then provides further support, going through several boring incidents involving scientists using involuntary thinking to come up with major breakthroughs in science. And, finally, he makes a third version of his original NewView thesis out of that, which involves what he sees as an ongoing pattern of scientists NOT giving due credit to the involuntary thinking they actually use to make their scientific breakthroughs.
The pattern of these three analyses - OldView, then NewView main idea, and then support - is standard for published essays. Try the pattern out on any published essay, and you'll see how true this is.
The significance of all this?
Writing instructors aren't focusing much on newness in published essays and articles, particularly reversal newness. And that means they aren't teaching you processes on how to create and write with useful reversals of OldViews in your own writing, right?
Now, you may also be thinking, "Reverse? Is that all there is to newness?" And you're right, there is more.
In fact, there are a total of five categories of NewViews you can use to improve all levels of your writing?the idea level, the paragraph level, the sentence level, the word level, and the organizational level. Can you guess at those other four types of newness?
C'mon! Give it a whirl!

By: William R. Drew, Jr.

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Now you'll want to learn more about Bill Drew's popular e-book, The Secret DNA of Writing Essays-And Everything Else. You'll also want to see his other books on writing at his website: The Secret DNA of Analyzing Short Stories, The Secret DNA of Topic Sentences That Entice Readers, The Secret DNA of Thesis Statements, and more. Check out the great testimonials & c