The Structure of Writing: A Short How-To Guide to Organize Your Stories, Essays, Reports, and More (The Elements of Writing Book 7) by Charles Euchner

Author:Charles Euchner [Euchner, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New American Press
Published: 2013-11-28T20:00:00+00:00

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

Mitch: No, what?

Curly: This. (He holds up one finger.)

Mitch: Your finger?

Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean s—.

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

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

—City Slickers

One may be the loneliest number, as Three Dog Night says in its hit song of 1969, but it’s also the most powerful. When you focus on one thing, everything else fades into the background.

Oneness suggests, above all, wholeness and unity. When something is complete, it does not need outsiders. One is also simple; in fact, the Latin root of simple, semel, means “a single time” and “for the first time.” Oneness also stands for integrity. If there is one way to do something, it is usually the best of many different ways.

History books overflow with stories of singular characters—Christ, Cleopatra, Lincoln, Keller, Gandhi, King, to note a random half-dozen—who stand apart. We learn a lot by looking at the world-changing abilities of such singular characters.

Singular events also fill the history books. The Declaration of Independence, Gettysburg, the murder of Archduke Ferdinand, the Great Crash, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, JFK’s assassination, and 9/11 mark turning points in history.

In a sense, oneness defines the march of human history. Religion shifted from polytheism to monotheism with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Government shifted from congeries of small city-states to unified nation-states; in modern times, dreamers from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Gates have aspired to create some form of global government.

Oneness appeals to people because it sweeps away the confusion and clutter of manyness. When Thomas Hobbes wrote the Leviathan, in the aftermath of the English Civil War, he could see no other way to create order—and, ironically, liberty too—than to install a Sovereign with absolute power. Two centuries later, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty outlines “one very simple principle”—the idea that people ought not interfere with other people’s affairs—as the essential rule of human communities.

We use the number one to make sweeping claims about people, events, ideas, everything. Consider these passages:

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