The Essence of Articles & Essays

By Bill Drew - Jul 08 , 2008

Not only is the NewView concept the heart of fiction — as I showed in my post last week — it is also the essence of insightful articles and essays.

Let’s first take a look at George Orwell’s widely anthologized essay, Politics and the English Language, and see what NewView lurks there.

In the first paragraph, Orwell sets out the OldView that,

“Our civilization is decadent and our language—so the argument runs [acknowledging that this is the established, shared, and familiar OldView]—must inevitably share in the general collapse . . . [because] language is a natural growth [of our civilization] and not an instrument which we [can] shape for our own purposes [end of OldView].”

The second paragraph of Orwell’s essay asserts that —–

“the [OldView] process is reversible [Ah ha! a Reverse NewView! Told you so!]. . . . [begin NewView] If one gets rid of these [bad linguistic] habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration [end of NewView statement].”

The real clincher is that Orwell even goes on to address the problem of content and the significance of newness (there it is, again! Focus on NewView!) in generating language and clear thought as he castigates one writer because —

“. . . he “feels impelled” to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new [there’s that word!] to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern [the uninsightful OldView]. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made old phrases . . . can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, for every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”

Orwell has the right idea — if you’re just spouting the Party Line (boring OldViews, already known), you won’t be thinking for yourself, and you won’t be saying anything new (no NewViews). And, of course, without communicating a NewView, you have nothing to say, and you’re just wasting your audience’s time, as well as your own.

Another example of NewView as the essence of prose writing is Carl Sagan’s article/essay, The Abstraction of Beasts.

Sagan begins his essay by stating the shared OldView:

“‘Beasts abstract not,’ announced John Locke, expressing mankind’s prevailing [shared, traditional, familiar OldView] opinion throughout recorded history.”

For this traditional OldView to be changed in some way would certainly be new and of value. Sagan ends his first paragraph by tentatively asserting such a Newview:

“Could abstract thought be a matter not of kind but of degree? Could other animals be capable of abstract thought but more rarely or less deeply than humans?”

In most of the rest of his essay, Sagan details the results of several modern scientific experiments that indicate some primates do, indeed, abstract to some degree. Though Sagan does use new scientific facts for support, his emphasis is on NewViews, which makes what he wrote an article or an essay, not a report.

Whether fiction or prose, NewView is the very essence of all good writing.

Copyright ( C ) 2008 by William R. Drew Jr. All Rights Reserved.