What to Do with New View in Writing, Reading, Communicating

You’ve learned about NewView here on my blog and you’re interested in learninghow to write better or how to teach your students to write better. But because the 5 NewView Options —

• reverse
• add
• subtract
• substitute
• rearrange

—work with EVERYthing written or spoken, it seems that you, like many people, just aren’t quite sure what to do with NewView. Somehow, the concept seems too big to handle. And for some, the concept seems too uncomfortable for them to work with because it’s just so different from other things they’ve used in the past.
I think part of people’s hesitation about using NewView comes from their forgetting that those 5 NewView Options are meant to be used with the 5 OldView Categories:

• values
• expectations
• experiences
• reasoning
• language

And people tend to forget that the “values” and “expectations” categories are the two most important of those categories because almost all stories use them (actually, I haven’t found one yet that doesn’t, but I’m being modest).
And so you can teach students (or yourself) about NewView by starting with stories they (or you) are already familiar with (to see NewView Analysis in action, see my book, The Secret DNA of Analyzing Short Stories; it does a NewView Analysis of ten classic short stories; my newest book, The Secret DNA of Analyzing Novels will be released soon, as well).
On the Testimonials page on this website, an elementary teacher named Jeffrey C. Ballard briefly shares his successful experience in teaching his students–third, fourth, and fifth graders–to write using NewView. Anybody can do what he did:
First, he had them bring in to class their favorite storybook. And he took two weeks to talk about each story with the class, showing them how each story had the same NewView three-step pattern in common:
Step #1. OldView strong value statement, by or about the main character, at the beginning
Step #2. Support/undercutting of OldView, in the middle
Step #3. NewView Reverse of OldView, at the end
Ballard said that at the end of the two weeks, his third, fourth, and fifth graders were making suggestions on how their favorite authors could have improved their stories by using the 5 NewView Options better. They had become literary critics! Elementary school students!
Second, the teacher shared some good short essays with his students and talked about the NewViews that were in the essays. The students also began to make comments about how the essays could be improved by doing a better job of using the 5 NewView Options and the 5 OldView Categories.
Third, the teacher helped the students write down a list or inventory of things they liked, things they disliked, and things they didn’t care about. And on the chalkboard he wrote down specific instances of their likes and dislikes from what they had written down and showed them how to reverse them, add to them, subtract from them, substitute in them, and rearrange them. In short, he demonstrated over and over, from material they liked in their own lives, how to take an OldView and change it into a NewView, in the 5 different NewView Option ways.
Then, about two months after he had introduced NewView to them, Ballard gave his little students their first writing assignment using NewView. The result was predictable: ALL his students improved materially in their writing.
And you can use that same procedure, for just yourself or for students you teach. It works. Why? Because if you are not communicating what people already know, you are communicating–speaking or writing or whatever–what’s new to them. You can’t get around that. And since you are just about ALWAYS communicating the 5 NewView Options being used on one or more of the 5 OldView Categories, you need to learn to make that contrast clearly, colorfully, and memorably between the old and the new with all the right NewView Reinforcing keywords.
So—–

Say it true,
Say it you,
Say it new,
Say it clearly—–
OldView – NewView!