The Myanmar Syndrome—Part II

By Bill Drew - Aug 01 , 2008

To see my previous article, The Myanmar Syndrome—Part I, click here.

The “What If” Test

For evaluating many things, there is often a “What If” test that can reveal the quality or the problems with something. So let’s do such a test for an imagined piece of writing.

Now, what if all the writing experts agree that a specific piece of writing—such as an article or an essay—has all the following ‘good stuff’ in it:

• Good grammar, spelling, punctuation (all the mechanics and formatting)
• Great sentences
• Marvelous word choices
• Brilliant images
• Good organization:

o A fine, clear beginning that arouses interest
o A set of body paragraphs that thoroughly support the main point
o A grand, inspiring conclusion

• An intriguing, exotic subject (life on Mars? They’ve discovered ice there, now.)
• Everything else that writing experts agree should be there, in quality and quantity

BUT (here’s the test) —

What if the reader already knows the information and the point of view?
What if there’s nothing new for the reader in the writing?

In that case, it simply doesn’t matter how well something is written, does it? If it’s old news to the reader (we’re not counting reprints of writings already popular, such as classic fiction or a published magazine article), it simply doesn’t matter how well it’s written.

What could be more plain and clear than that?

“What’s New to the Reader”

There you have it—the most important thing in writing is, “What’s New to the Reader,” which I call NewView.

You may say, “Wait a minute! That’s not new! I’ve had lots of writing consultants tell me to—

• ‘be innovative,’
• ‘say something fresh,’
• “say something new,” and
• “Don’t use clichés.”

I’ve heard and read the very same thing, hundreds of times, literally (very early on in my career, I was saying it, too). In fact, you may not know this, but as far back as Plato’s dialogue titled Phaedrus, for example, Plato had Socrates state that,

“When you leave the commonplaces [shared subject matter], then there may be some originality.”

So originality—saying something new—was acknowledged as important even around 400 B.C. in ancient Greece.

However, Socrates—

• did not define originality or newness,
• did not tell how to get it, and
• did not even tell how to be sure when you have it.

To be fair, however, all other major theoretical and practical works about writing since then have done the same thing—invoking the importance of newness, but omitting anything practical and helpful about newness.

You see, writing texts only hint at newness, with vague admonitions for the need to be “interesting and creative,” to have something “worthwhile” to say, and to be “insightful” (which implies a new insight for the intended readers).

For example, a typical, very good and very popular college composition text, the Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing, seems to positively come alive in a few places by talking about newness in writing:

At the heart of these communities of writers and readers is an interest in common questions and the hope for better or different answers. Writers write because they have something new or surprising or challenging to say in response to a question. Readers read because they share the writer’s interest in the problem and want to deepen their understanding. [underlining, italics, and bolding have been added]

While that is a promising beginning, the Allyn & Bacon authors immediately lose their focus in the middle of it. The verbiage “…new or surprising or challenging…” is an example of the confusion that seems to exist everywhere about newness.

How can something be “surprising” without being new? How can something be “challenging” to readers without being in some way new to them?

This problem with thinking straight about newness and talking clearly about it is the very essence of the Myanmar Syndrome, of not focusing clearly on the interrelationships of the parts, the patterns, the processes, the purpose, and the perspective:

• “They were looking at parts. They were not looking at patterns.
  They saw nothing of processes, they looked at nothing with the right purpose.
  They don’t know how to look in perspective.”

It is this constant running on to other terms—the constant distraction from the real nature of newness—that causes so many problems with teaching writing, as shown toward the end of the Allyn & Bacon text:

One dominant way that readers process information and register ideas is by moving from already known (old) information to new information. In a nutshell, this concept means that new material is meaningful to a reader only if it is linked to old material that is already meaningful. [underlining and italics added]

Whether it is at the beginning or at the end of the book, the authors hit right on the importance of newness—and then they back right off, as if newness were too simple. “One dominant way?” No, that is the only way!

And whether it is information or views and values, newness can be conveyed only through using old, already shared material that is processed by one of the 5 NewView Options. (By the way, there are 5 OldView Categories, as well. It’s a simple truth that any kind of newness is always based on some kind of oldness–or else you wouldn’t have the words to talk about the newness.)

Next week in The Myanmar Syndrome–Part III, I’ll talk more about how these two powerful sets of absolutely basic elements interact to produce newness in any communication situation–especially in writing,

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