How to Write

The truth is, you already know how to write.

But the problem is, too many teachers and books tell you too many picky little things to focus on.

And they simply ignore and blank out the most important, the very most key idea that you instinctively understand about writing.

Just to be sure we’re on the same page about those picky items, I’ll just name some of them:

• Voice
  Organization
  Sentence structure
  Word choice
  Variety of sentence length
  Vocabulary
  Logos, Ethos, Pathos
  Reasoning
  Grammar, spelling, punctuation, syntax
  Thesis
  Introductions
  Conclusions
  Topic sentences
  Passive vs. active sentences
  Subject and verb agreement
  Split infinitives
  Support, evidence, details, specifics

As we all know, each of those things have their place, no doubt about it.

But that’s a whole bunch of ‘trees’ clumped together that make it harder to see the the overall shape of the ‘forest,’ right? That is, there are so many parts and details that it’s difficult to see how they all work together. Wouldn’t it be great if there were just one main idea, one principle of writing, that all those parts related to? Then it would be much, MUCH easier to work with all those parts, don’t you think?

That’s what I’m offering, here—one main, controlling idea that makes sense of all those parts.

Like all good, powerful ideas, the principle that makes ALL the many parts of writing work together is quite simple, and here it is:

What’s new to the reader

But, you know, it’s strange– the idea of new has always been a problem because it’s so fantastically VAST and so incredibly VAGUE.

New has simply been a huge, dark, mysterious box in everyone’s mind that holds everything that we’ve never experienced, seen, heard of, felt, or thought before. Up to now, we’ve never had a way of distinguishing one kind of newness from another in that huge, unclear box in our minds.

One thing we do know is that something couldn’t be new unless there was something old to compare it to, right? But old is just as vast and vague as new, right? So what’s missing?

Answer: Two insightful sets of categories.

Five Kinds of Oldness
Here’s the list of the five categories of oldness that newness can’t exist without:

• • Values
  • Expectations
  • Experiences
  • Reasoning
  • Language

A small list–but powerful!

We can’t do without these 5 OldView Categories in basic, everyday communication, especially in writing and in discussing writing.

Just as “you can’t explain color to a blind man,” you can’t communicate well with anyone you don’t already share a lot with in these 5 OldView Categories.

That’s why practically all well-written essays begin with a strong OldView value statement.

Good writers always have a sense that they must provide, early on, something that they will provide a change to, regardless of what they are writing.

BLUNTLY: If there’s no change in the shared OldView, there’s no communication, no NewView, no story, nothing to say except the same old thing. So there’s gotta be something definite at the start of a piece of writing, some OldView, that will be changed into a NewView. Makes common, everyday sense, doesn’t it?

Now you’re wondering, aren’t you, “So just how does a writer change those strong OldView value statements?”

Five Kinds of Newness

Glad you asked. That’s what the fundamental processes of the 5 NewView Options are all about:

• • Reverse
  • Add
  • Subtract
  • Substitute
  • Rearrange

That seems like an absurdly small number to cover all things new, doesn’t it? But that’s the real deal, as they say. Just think of something new, identify the old that it’s related to, and you’ll see one or more of those 5 NewView Options in use (excepting merely “recent,” of course, which is only an addition of time to something already shared and old).

At first, I doubted that small list. One word that gave me a big hang-up was synthesis.

But as I researched and thought more and more about it, I found that explaining synthesis requires you to use words like blend, integrate, and merge. With those and similar words, it always comes down to put together in some special way—which is the same as add together. That’s simply the NewView Add Option.

The word analysis gave me similar trouble. But I found that analysis was actually a form of the Subtract Option. With it, you subtract parts from the whole to study the functioning of each part to see how they all fit together to make up the whole.

At this point, you should read my article on this website titled, NewView in Essays & Cultural Patterns, which demonstrates that Reverses are the dominant NewView Option used in published essays and in cultural patterns of speech.

To get the full picture of how NewView can help you to write at every level of the writing process, you should read the articles now displayed on the secondary Menu Bar, above:

• • Write Your Thesis
• • Use Stories
• • Use Examples
• • Use Reasoning
• • Use Topic Sentences