In every published essay, you will find that they all have one thing in common: they all tell the reader something new. But when critics and professors talk about essays, they almost always overlook or ignore that fact. (I know, it seems hard to believe, but it’s true). In fact, we can see a pattern in all the published essays of first identifying the old view, the familiar and accepted view, of something and then, almost immediately, identifying a new view. , which always opposes or reverses the previous vision. The thesis of the new vision is then always followed by a support. (By the way, you can Google the titles of each of the essays I’ll mention here by putting them in quotes. Google will provide you with a link to at least one online instance of each essay, in its entirety.) For example, the first paragraph of George Orwell’s 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 interact and seem to be unbreakably linked. In the second paragraph, Orwell notes that “the process is reversible” and that improving the use of the English language can improve English politics and thus help save the British Empire. That’s a clear pattern from old to new, a new investment view. And it is followed by support. Another good example is Carl Sagan’s popular published essay, The abstraction of beasts. The first sentence of the essay clearly states the old point of view:
“Beasts are not abstracted,” announced John Locke, expressing the prevailing opinion of humanity throughout recorded history.
In the second paragraph, Sagan introduces his new point of view in reverse to his previous one by asking whether animals might be capable of abstract thought, albeit possibly less deeply or more rarely than humans. The remainder of the essay provides facts, reasoning, and speculation to support Sagan’s new view of animals that really think or abstract. A third good example is Isaac Asimov’s rather amusing essay (at least at first), The Eureka Phenomenon. It is true that the fullness of the relationship between Asimov’s old and new vision occurs in three stages. But he clearly talks first about his old problem of writer’s block and then explains how he learned to solve it by watching an action movie, which is his new vision. (Interestingly, the above point of view is not actually expressed at the time. Since Asimov is a thinker and writer, he knows many people who run into Writer’s Block, so he assumes that most of the people have some kind of Mental Block from time on their thinking and would be interested in a good solution to that recurring problem.) Next, compare voluntary and involuntary thinking with voluntary and involuntary breathing. And in paragraphs ten and eleven he makes a formal statement of his new vision thesis. To support that, he immediately begins to tell the famous story of Archimedes solving the king’s problem and running naked through the streets shouting that he found the solution. What most of us usually whose After reading this essay, remember that Asimov is more supportive, going through various boring stories and incidents involving scientists using the involuntary method of thinking to come up with great advances in science. And finally, he makes a third version of his original new vision 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 scientific advances. The pattern of the three analyzes I just gave you — the old view, then the new view thesis, then the support — of three popular published essays is standard for published essays. Test the pattern in any published essay and see how true it is. So how do we as writers and writing teachers make novelty prominent in our own writing and in our students’ writing, especially their essays? Are you ready for this? Here’s the big secret-
We gain novelty in our own essays and in those of our students by becoming sensitive to the everyday patterns of novelty that exist in our culture and learning to use them in our everyday thinking, writing, and communications.
For example, there is the Dark cloud, silver lining cultural pattern of novelty. Usually, when something very unpleasant or bad happens in our lives, we get depressed and then one of our friends says something like, “Don’t worry, Carmen, even though things are looking pretty bleak right now, something good will come of this.” Just wait and see.” The new aspect of this pattern is that we don’t expect something good to come out of something bad, but it does! The negative expectations of the old vision are reversed, thus producing a new vision. Here are some examples of the Dark Cloud, Silver Lining pattern that students can easily relate to:
- I cried when I bombarded the final exam, but I was overjoyed when I found out that my scores on all the quizzes, reports, and other exams in class helped me.
- Our basketball team had a bad and sadly disappointing season, but in the playoffs we were absolutely ecstatic when our team won every game and won the state championship!
- My circle of friends and I are poor, but we have discovered that the real fun is in sharing, not in the glitzy, glamorous, and expensive activities.
- My family’s house is dirt cheap and it’s in a slum, but we’re actually pretty proud that we have the cleanest, best-kept house in the whole damn town.
- My part-time job is so terribly boring and pays so little that I wonder why I’m still working there, until I look around and notice that a lot of kids don’t have any jobs.
then there is the david vs goliath cultural pattern of novelty. Here’s how it works: We all know that the big ones intimidate and overwhelm the little ones; that’s the way things are, what everyone expects and accepts because we see it happen all the time. For example, some large health insurance companies take advantage of powerless individual policyholders. Movies are made about these kinds of situations, like the moving 1997 film the rainmaker, starring Matt Damon and Danny DeVito, in which a large insurance company is taken down by a little woman and her wet-behind-the-ears lawyer, fresh out of school. So when the little one beats the big one, like David did with Goliath in the Biblical story, everyone is a little surprised and a little glad. It’s very similar to ‘Good defeats evil’ in that the big ones or groups almost always display their power and abuse the good little ones like you and me. The novelty of this pattern is that experience has taught us all that big and powerful bad guys often make mincemeat of little good guys, so that when the old negative perspective is reversed, we have a new perspective. Here are examples of the David vs. Goliath cultural pattern of novelty:
- My poor aunt took the IRS to court to stop them from taking her car to pay her back taxes. She knew that she would lose. But my meek aunt beat the IRS in court by standing up to them, passionately exposing the facts the IRS tried to cover up.
- Larry was a bright student, but he was really very small and very meek and mousey. So when he got into a protracted and moving argument in our civics class with the debate team captain and embarrassed him, everyone cheered!
- My little sister, Jenny (7 years younger), and I often compete for time with Dad, and I always win, of course. But I have to admire how lately she has learned to spell him and his wallet so cleverly away from me, the little brat!
- My friend Emily has a little sister (4 years younger) who always wants to go to our circle of girls, but Emily never lets her come. Last Friday, however, the little sister convinced the rest of us to take her with us and leave Emily at home!
- I’m really stupid with computers, and my brother Stan is kind of a computer genius. So when his computer crashed one Saturday and I was the one who figured out how to fix it, I promised him I’d never let him forget it.
Many cultural patterns of novelty exist ‘out there’ for us to tap into, both to generate new ideas and pre-existing formats to convey our new ideas. Can you think of others from your own experiences? Let me suggest a few more that I’m sure you’ll recognize, just by their names:
- Glitters, Not Gold (“All that glitters is not gold”).
- Lion Roars, No Teeth (“Someone or something powerful does nothing or fails”).
- What came first, the chicken or the egg? (“Cause and effect are reversed/changed”).
I’m sure you can provide the examples of these three cultural patterns of novelty, without my help. The big idea here, of course, is that novelty is all around us, particularly in published work like essays. And if we’re going to write an essay or anything else, we’d better make sure we focus on focus #1 in all communications, published or unpublished… What’s new to the reader.