From Chapter I: The How-To Form

Introduction

How often has someone, in giving directions, left out essentials of the task or blurred them because they didn’t see it the way you would see it? The how-to form is implicit or explicit in the oral or written telling of anything we do. From cooking a meal to persuading a jury, from playing a game to fixing a car, from obeying rules to modifying them, from job to sport to play, it focuses on the physical and psychological skills, competencies, techniques, make-sure points, and attitudes for doing whatever it is effectively. The how-to is a fundamental form of on-the-job writing. The naturalness and variety of the how-to make it pleasurable to write. It is also one of the most common forms of published writing. All forms of engineering and industry and communications, all of the sciences and social sciences, most professions, most trades, require clear technical perception and effective writing.

The telling and demonstrating of how-to instructions that can be clearly recalled and followed has been the responsibility of how-to tellers and the how-to form throughout human evolution. Our dependence upon the cooperative use of technology (from rocks, bones, sticks, and fire to cybernetics) makes the how-to basic and crucial. The how-to puts a strong emphasis upon vivid imagery, course of reasoning, and persuasion.

Here is a part of a how-to that was told orally and then retold by the author in writing: (It’s from "Getting the Most Out of Frisbeeing," by Allan Johnson.)

You say you can’t throw a frisbee straight? You want to throw it toward someone and it veers off into another direction? You say you throw it up; it flies up; it stops in mid-air; it flies back directly towards you, over your head, and hits someone on the head? Is that what’s troubling you, son? Well, the problem is in handling the thing: you’re holding it wrong. Let me explain…

Writing Your How-To: The Subject

Think of a skill you know how to do well, and of telling it to someone so that person can do it too, a job or sport or game or whatever, something you do with your hands or in which your hands and body play a significant part, i.e., a skill that requires physical-mental coordination, something you have done again and again, something you do well, something you enjoy doing. Think of telling it to someone, of gestures you would use. Start writing your how-to.

Some of you will say you have "writer’s block." Some of you will say that the blank page becomes a wall between you and what you have to say. Well, in fifteen years of teaching writing, I’ve had a number of students who have promptly claimed "writer’s block," and most of them completed the semester’s work. Some of you will say, "I can show you how to do it, but I can’t write it." I say, "Fine, if you can tell and show us, you’re well on the way to knowing how to tell it in writing. As a matter of fact, you can start telling us right now; in writing. Pick out a student in the class and tell it to that person now; in writing." Put the pen or pencil to paper, or fingers to the typewriter. Make the pencil move, the fingers type.

Make sure your how-to is a skill activity that you know how to do reasonably well. See the characteristic objects, characteristic situations, characteristic things that happen. See the special twists that you know about. See the points that the "you" must make sure of. Lay out a sequence of make-sure points, though many of these will occur to you in the process of writing. You don’t have to wait to figure out everything. You can write notes and discover the rest as you write.

Imagine yourself demonstrating your how-to to your audience. See yourself, (the authority) and "you" (the audience) as actors in it. See the usual situation of doing whatever it is. Let your hand be an extension of your voice. Concentrate on telling your how-to to someone. See it, and tell it so the someone can see it and do it.

Writing Your How-To: The Audience

Most writing is addressed to "mixed audiences." Put together two or three or four persons with different backgrounds, and you have a "mixed audience." Most literature is written for mixed audiences; or for anyone-who-can-see-and-hear-it, which is both a fundamental kind of telling what you see in your mind so someone else can see it and a most advanced form of "ideal" literary audience. Of course, all of these audience elements exist in certain degrees for any kind of writing at any time.

The "mixed audience" is the most common audience and the one you should ordinarily anticipate and imagine during your writing. Your class is probably a good example of a "mixed audience." Technical reports are frequently organized in two parts, the first being addressed to a "mixed audience," and the second to persons trained in the particular expertise.

When you write a how-to, you merge the "mix" of the anticipated audience with the "you" in your mind…

You need to move your audience to perceive, believe, and do what they might not otherwise perceive, believe and do - or would not perceive so clearly, believe so willingly, or do so effectively. In some cases, it means changing the audience’s mind or persuading the audience to try out a different understanding of a subject. This requires a convincing course of reasoning and persuasion. In rhetoric, "argument" is the term for a course of reasoning. The facts and sequence of how to do whatever it is are essential to the argument of a how-to. The way facts are presented can be as crucial as the necessary sequence…

From Chapter II: The Process of Writing

Successful, nonblocking student writers have their rules too, such as "If the rule doesn’t fit or work for me, I’ll change it or modify it." Successful student writers "try" to keep the audience in mind," but if their feeling for the audience becomes indistinct or uncertain, they continue writing anyway. They always seek people to give them feedback on their writing. "When stuck, write" is the one rule that the nonblocking, successful student writer uses religiously. Write to find your thesis, write to find what you have to say. Get feedback. Act upon feedback according to your own best perceptions about it. "Often, but not always," and "Sometimes, but not all the time" give you two important qualifications for any of the "good" rules about writing — and just about anything else. When stuck, make the pencil move, the fingers type. When stuck, sleep on it, but always come back to the writing, for it is in the writing that you will discover the subconscious solutions that are coming to you.

The experience of successful professional and student writers suggests strongly that the problems posed by any writing task are solved most effectively in the writing process itself, in a rich interplay of many writing activities.

If we recognize writing as "sustained speech," sustained by the page as we work it out, we have the opportunity to develop and heighten it in rewriting almost indefinitely. "Sustained speech" makes it possible for you to keep a rich interplay going between your mental rehearsal and your writing and rewriting. "Sustained speech" makes it possible for you to plunge ahead and keep your writing moving, with pauses to reread what you’ve written and cross out lines and phrases and write in others. "Sustained speech" makes it possible to keep a dialogue going with your own writing, with yourself as reader, with yourself listening to other readers in your mind. Many writers have said that their writing was not so much finished as finally "abandoned." We rewrite to an acceptable closure and "abandon" the piece of writing.

There is a trite admonition about rewriting that I must warn you about. That is the idea that you rewrite with a "cold critical eye." There is nothing "cold" about a productive process of rewriting. It may be positively heated and excited with the involvement of all your perceptions and faculties; it may be the most pleasurable part of writing. Certainly it should be "warm" and alive, even if calm. The "cold critical eye" can destroy good writing. Many times I’ve seen it happen that new and experienced writers alike make the writing worse when they try to rewrite, because they try with "a cold critical eye" to manipulate the writing in ways that don’t work with the writing’s own logic and magic. They muck up or cut up the best writing, stupidly expand the worst, and reformulate it in a way that doesn’t work as well as the original, all in the name of "cold critical rewriting." Rewriting demands sensitivity to the wisdom of the essay, report, poem, or story…

The Letter Form

Everyone has written letters - or notes, memos, messages - to people they know well, and undoubtedly felt that such writing was easier than writing essays or research reports for unknown audiences or for people they didn’t know well. Most of you certainly found it easier in high school to write notes and stories and letters that you passed among your friends than the compositions required by your English teacher. The private writing that you did for your high school peers, from what I’ve seen and what I remember from my high school days, generally contained better writing than much of the writing done for English classes - and the sentences were better-formed, too. Even writing an angry letter to an "unfriendly" audience allows you to retain the organizing confidence of your anger.

We see it happen again and again. The letter’s clear sense of audience helps you organize what you have to say. When you’re writing a letter to friends, you draw upon the language you use in your ordinary talk with them. It’s when you’re writing or talking to an audience with whom you feel you can’t trust your own language that your sentence sense becomes tangled.

Many people find it difficult to write to a broad, unknown audience, but much easier to write to one person. The fact that everyone else can read it, too, as if the letter were written to them, or as if they were listening in, is the grand bonus, the trick, of the game. Many people will write well for the first time when they write to a single person they pick out in class. Musicians and public speakers often pick out one face in the audience and play or speak to that person. The rest of the audience hears the performance too and probably is not aware that the performer is playing to one person. Other players and speakers are able to handle the sense of address to the large array of faces and persons in the audience, picking out the liveliest, most attentive faces and playing to them. Many people find it difficult to read aloud to a broad audience of faces, as in a class, but can read effectively to one person in the audience, just as the musician or public speaker plays to one person. Many students who do not read well out loud to the whole class will read clearly when they address the writing to one person in the class. John Steinbeck said that he would always try to get the feeling of telling his stories to a friend, because then the writing would begin to flow. Other writers seek the feeling of telling their writing to a listening presence in themselves. Barbara Tuchman, the historian, speaks of "the complicated fugue" that occurs between herself and her imagined reader during her writing. A successful student writer referred to this process as "living with the reader…"

From Chapter IV: Point-of-View

In this section, we examine the basic structure of point-of-view rather than the variety of point-of-view innovations. For instance, we cannot here deal with such first-person variations as monologues, soliloquies, stories-within-a-story (see section by that name), epistolary first person (see Letters section), "stream of consciousness," internal monologues, memoirs, and so forth. Nor can we deal with all the variations of the third person, or the collective "we," and so on. Here we deal with the basic structure of point of view for narrative and expository writing.

In the following written accounts of oral tellings, we see the fundamental point-of-view structure of any kind of telling, story or expository. That is, we see the tale-teller taking the overall point-of-view and responsibility for the tale, while simultaneously enacting characters, seeing things from their vantage points, taking internal points-of-view of perception, feeling, and thought, giving the reactions of characters, taking the listener’s (or reader’s) point-of-view, and employing an attitude toward the subject and the tale. From this basic dramatic point-of-view structure of an oral tale-telling comes the tremendous expansion of point-of-view dimensions, useful in essay as well as in expository narrative and fictional writing. In the course of any single writing, the tale-teller and essayist touch the original ground of oral telling in the compositional theater of the mind again and again, drawing from the wellspring of the basic structure of point-of-view…

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