Writing Essays - Where's the Most Basic Idea?

There are many forms of writing, but writing essays and articles are the most common forms of writing. 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, writing instructors 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's old, and they have no strategy for capitalizing on that basic concept.

Because of that examples, reasoning, and speculation that support Sagan's NewView about animals actually thinking and 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 guided) 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 teachers and textbooks 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 types 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 figure out those other four types of newness?

C'mon! Give it a whirl!

About the Author

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