Unity in Writing: Teach Students to Hammer Their Thoughts into Unity

Unity and Numbers

Unity means oneness. The common prefix uni- means one. In most of the words, the oneness comes through quite clearly: unicycle, united, unite, unified, unicorn, uniform, union, unique, and universe.

Let me place unity (oneness) in perspective. Here is the first lesson in unity: 1 + 1 + 1 = 1. That right there is the essence of unity.

Although we don’t typically think about numbers in writing, we use them a great deal in writing instruction. In particular, number relate to structure, rhythm, and style. When we teach students about numbers in writing, we want to help them understand that the numbers must all add up to form a clear and unified whole—or, put another way, ONE.

Let’s take a quick look at a few numbers!

The Power of Three: People love to make a big deal over the Power of Three in writing and storytelling. What they fail to mention is that the THREE must add up to ONE.

Three is the number of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Three Little Pigs, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Three is the number of beginning, middle, and ending. We have three characters and three events, and the characters all try three times. What’s important about three? Three shows us a true comparison: too hot, too cold, and just right! Three show a series or pattern of action. With three, it’s not just a coincidence—it’s a pattern.

The Power of Two: The number two is an equally important number. Think about it: pro-con, cause-effect, compare-contrast, problem-solution, and claim-proof. Where would we be without those common thought patterns? In fact, two might be the number of natural thought. One person tells the pros, while the other brings up cons. You have a problem? Well, I’ve got a solution. We see an effect, and we automatically wonder what caused it.

More Numbers: A complete list of the number-related writing concepts, techniques, and strategies would be long. Here is a short list.

We have the three-act structure, five-paragraph essay, seven plot points in a novel, three main ideas in a speech, three-level outlines, parallel structure, iambic pentameter, symmetry, balance, proportion, and repetition. Additionally, many of the classical schemes and tropes are grounded in numbers. It’s the same with poetry.

Once again, the goal is always to form a clear and unified whole—or, put another way, ONE. We must hammer our thoughts into unity to achieve this.

Unity and Adding Up to One: “Hammer Your Thoughts into Unity”

In one of its advertisements, Microsoft said we make 35,000 decisions every day. That’s decisions! How many thoughts do we have daily? It’s an estimated 70,000 thoughts per day. These numbers illustrate why this next quote is vital to thinking and writing.

One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: ‘Hammer your thoughts into unity.’ For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence. — Autobiographies by William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) – Irish poet and writer.

Hammer your thoughts into unity. How many thoughts run through a writer’s mind? I think the issue of writer’s block is rarely about not having any thoughts—but instead, about having so many thoughts that you don’t know what your point is. Writer’s block is the act of trying to hammer one’s thoughts into unity by thinking. In reality, you often have to start writing to discover that MAIN POINT or MAIN IDEA and then throw away about half the words you used to discover it. In short, the writing process is the process of hammering your thoughts into unity.

I ask both these questions constantly. Essentially, they are the same question.

1. What’s my point?
2. What am I trying to say?

How do we make points? Do we just state our points explicitly and add facts? It’s usually more complicated than that. We may use illustrations, descriptions, reasoning, anecdotes, examples, analogies, metaphors, comparisons, quotations, ask questions, draw conclusions, etc.

Put simply, writers often use many seemingly unrelated and scattered ideas to form a compelling unified whole that people want to read. As we write, we select diverse ideas and shape and refine them until they form a coherent and unified whole. We hammer our ideas into unity.

70,000 thoughts per day! Clearly, we don’t say every thought that pops into our brain or write down every thought. A thoughtful communicator tries to make points and make points clear by hammering their thoughts into unity. What was the point of that little story you just told? You told the story because it made a point, didn’t you? Or were you just blabbering? Yes, the point of a story is usually implied—but if you don’t have a point, you may be just blabbering. Know what your point is. Hammer all the details into unity to make that point clear even when it is implied—especially when it’s implied.

Unity of Purpose: There Is No “I” in Team

Phil Jackson is a legendary figure in basketball, both as a player and coach. He is best known for coaching the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers to a combined 11 NBA championships, which is the most in NBA history for a head coach. Even if you haven’t heard of Phil Jackson, you have probably heard of a few of the star players he coached: e.g., Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal.

According to Phil Jackson, the difficult part of coaching great players and big stars is that they have big egos and are a bit full of themselves. It’s hard to build a team around players who think they are bigger than the team. In fact, the cardinal rule in sports is that no one player is bigger than the team. Have you heard this old adage? “There is no ‘I’ in team.” Michael Jordan famously replied to that statement with, “There’s not, but there’s an ‘I’ in win!” If you are wondering, that is not what a coach wants to hear—even from Michael Jordon.

When Phil Jackson talks about the secret to his success as a coach, it comes down to one word: Unity.

Basketball is a great mystery. You can do everything right. You can have the perfect mix of talent and the best system of offense in the game. You can devise a foolproof defensive strategy and prepare your players for every possible eventuality. But if the players don’t have a sense of oneness as a group, your efforts won’t pay off. And the bond that unites a team can be so fragile, so elusive. When I look back on the 1995–96 season, we had absolutely everything in place that we needed to fulfill our destiny—talent, leadership, attitude, and unity of purpose. — Phil Jackson – Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (2013)

Phil Jackson knew that there is no championship ring without unity of purpose. Once again, “If the players don’t have a sense of oneness as a group, your efforts won’t pay off.” That’s also true in writing.

Phil Jackson used the words “unity of purpose.” So did Alexander Bain in his 1866 text that single-handedly created the paragraph theory that we teach today:

The division of discourse next higher than the sentence is the Paragraph: which is a collection of sentences with unity of purpose. A paragraph handles and exhausts a distinct topic. — Alexander Bain – English Composition and Rhetoric (1866)

Put simply, a paragraph is a collection of sentences with unity of purpose.

Writers must create unity in each paragraph, which must fit together to create unity in the whole composition. Let’s call this Two Levels of Unity:

Level 1: Whole Composition Unity: The whole composition (essay, report, story, etc.) is a unified whole. The individual paragraphs in each whole composition work together to create unity of purpose.

Level 2: Paragraph Unity: Every paragraph is a unified whole. The individual words and sentences in each paragraph work together to create unity of purpose.

Unity and Curly’s Law: Write About Just One Thing

Another way of understanding unity is to understand Curly’s Law of JUST ONE THING.

Level 1: Whole Composition Unity: The whole composition (essay, report, story, etc.) is about just one thing.

Level 2: Paragraph Unity: Each paragraph is about just one thing.

In the movie City Slickers (1991), even Curly, the tough and crusty old cowboy, understood the need to boil things down to “just one thing.” In fact, Curly’s philosophy became so well-known and popular that it is now referred to as Curly’s Law. The main character, Mitch, was feeling lost. Mitch had lost his way.

Do writers ever feel that way? Lost in what they are trying to say? Answer: Yes. This is why we must hammer our thoughts into unity.

Lucky for Mitch, old Curly was there to point the way:

Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?

Mitch: No, what?

Curly: This. (holds up one finger)

Mitch: Your finger?

Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else will work its way out.

Mitch: That’s great, but… what’s the one thing?

Curly: That’s what you’ve got to figure out.

So, in both life and writing, it all comes down to just one thing. The tricky part is that you are the one who must figure out what that one thing is.

In reality, we teach the concept of just one thing in writing right from the start. Students learn about main ideas and topic sentences. Later, students learn about thesis statements. All of these concepts address the idea of just one thing. These concepts attempt to teach students the art of hammering their thoughts into just one thing.

I use Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay to create highly effective multi-paragraph writers FAST. It is the only writing curriculum that instills in students an intuitive understanding of how ideas connect in organized and natural writing. It uses the A, B, C Sentence ™ and Secret A, B, C Sentence ™ to build a practical mastery of the Hierarchy of Ideas in writing! Unity is guaranteed since every idea is connected through A, B, C thinking, which is thinking in outlines.

Then, we build on that foundation as students write across the curriculum. As students write across the curriculum, these two questions are never far from our thoughts:

1. What’s my point?
2. What am I trying to say?

Just one thing captures the essence of unity at every level in a Hierarchy of Ideas. Without the concept of just one thing, writing is just an endless stream of thoughts. Without the focus of making a point, the thoughts are essentially without meaning—at least for the reader.

Single-Sentence Unity Statements: Trillion Dollar Mission Statements Are Unity Statements

Question: How can my paragraphs be about just one thing? How can my whole composition be about just one thing? That’s hard!

It’s been a long-standing business practice to create single-sentence mission statements. These single-sentence mission statements often capture billions or even trillions of dollars of economic value and activity. Single-sentence (or very short) mission statements are essential for businesses because they create clarity and focus and are a powerful way to communicate the company’s core purpose.

Initially, both Google and Facebook did just one thing. Here’s how Google and Facebook summed up their entire business in just one sentence. These are their words:

1. “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

 

2. “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

These sentences are mission statements.

A multi-billion-dollar or trillion-dollar corporation is not a paragraph or an essay. It is something larger and more complex than any book ever written. Large corporations have multiple levels and multiple categories with multiple levels. It’s staggering that these multinational businesses can express everything they do in a single sentence. It’s commonly believed that if you need more than a single sentence, you have a problem.

Businesses are extremely slow to change even a single word in their mission statement. The reason is that when you change the mission statement, you change the entire business. The mission statement is the top-level purpose of the company. Google had that exact sentence posted on their website for well over a decade. I’ve heard that sentence has been there since day one without a single word being changed. It’s just one thing!

We also use this single-sentence thinking in writing. In fact, it’s vital in writing! Let’s take a look at single-sentence thinking in writing.

1. Company Mission Statement: A mission statement is an entire business stated in a single sentence.

Here is how we apply this kind of thinking to writing:

2. Topic Sentence: A topic sentence is an entire paragraph stated in a single sentence. That’s exactly what the Secret A, B, C Sentence ™ in Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay does.

3. Thesis Statement: A thesis statement is an entire essay stated in a single sentence. But what exactly are thesis statements? Purdue OWL’s two example thesis statements on their website are an A, B, C Sentence ™ and a Secret A, B, C Sentence ™. These types of thesis statements make sense to even elementary school students and are found in Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay. Basically, a thesis statement is the same as a topic sentence but covers an entire essay.

4. Story Premise: A story premise is an entire story stated in a single sentence.

Finding Unity by Asking Questions: Questions That Help Writers Discover that One Thing at Each Level in the Hierarchy of Ideas

Although we won’t cover it in depth here, the Hierarchy of Ideas is another vital topic. The Hierarchy of Ideas and Unity are interconnected in clear and organized writing. As a rule, students use 3-4 levels in their writing.

Level 1: Whole Composition Unity: Unity in the Whole Composition

Level 2: Section Unity: Unity in Each Section

Level 3: Paragraph Unity: Unity in Each Paragraph

Level 4: Sentence Unity: Unity in Each Sentence

How do we create unity? We create unity throughout every stage of the writing process: 1) Prewriting, 2) Writing, 3) Rewriting, and 4) Publishing.

Side Note: In reality, you will never see your writing clearly until you publish. Once you publish, you see your writing through someone else’s eyes. Publishing makes you want to rewrite. My students frequently read their writing to at least one other person. That’s the fastest, easiest, and most powerful way to publish. Students gain new insights by feeling regret over some of their writing choices and errors. The next time they write, they remember the feeling of those regrets and try to avoid them. Regarding unity, when we read our writing aloud, we feel all the things we should have left out and grasp the things we should have included.

Some may wonder why I included that SIDE NOTE as it doesn’t relate to their interest in unity. For them, that’s a digression that harms unity. Although it relates to unity on some level, it doesn’t relate perfectly. It’s more related to “how to teach writing” and “the writing process.” By adding this additional note, I bring it back into unity by pointing out that it is an example of how digressions harm unity. Of course, as much as I love unity, I also agree with Holden Caulfield on some level. In The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Holden says, “The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all.” Okay, I’ll admit it. This belongs in a different section since we are supposed to be discussing “Finding Unity by Asking Questions.” But I’ll leave it here to make a point about both unity and digressions.

Back on Track: We must ask these questions constantly and at multiple levels of our hierarchy of ideas. We must ask them as we write sentences, write paragraphs, and write whole compositions. Ask these questions often:

1. What’s my point?

2. What am I trying to say?

3. What’s important about this? Is this essential, or is this unnecessary?

4. Does this help my readers to understand something? What does it help them to understand?

5. How does this fit in with what I am trying to say overall?

We must always remember:

1. Every word in a sentence must be an essential piece of that sentence’s unity.

2. Every sentence in a paragraph must be an essential piece of that paragraph’s unity.

3. Every paragraph in a composition (essay, report, story, etc.) must be an essential piece of that composition’s unity.

In short, a writer must include what is essential and leave out what is not essential.

To be clear, I don’t fill in the blanks as I write. And in the heat of writing and trying to say something important and discover truth, we often don’t even follow our prewriting plan. Sometimes, we have to see where things go. However, we can maintain focus by ASKING QUESTIONS. These two questions (which are really the same question) should be in mind and guide every writer as they do the WRITE part of the writing process:

1. What’s my point?

2. What am I trying to say?

This is how we create unity as we write. During the actual writing or drafting, the best we can do is to ask the questions above and try to stay on track.