Developing ideas
Development is not restatement
- Development means the piece ends somewhere it could not have started. An idea is taken further, complicated or turned over — not repeated in new words.
- The commonest Level 3 failure is a piece that circles. It is fluent, coherent and well written, and it remakes its paragraph-one observation, differently phrased, in every paragraph after.
- That piece is sustained without being developed. Both words are in the title, so the marker looks for them separately.
- Adding evidence is not development: three examples of one point are one point, three times.
- Nor is intensity, and nor is length. A 1,200-word piece with one idea is a 300-word piece with padding.
The first-and-last test
- Write your first paragraph's idea in one sentence. Write your last paragraph's idea in one sentence. Put them side by side.
- If they are the same sentence, the piece has not developed.
- If the second is the first plus and it was sad, it still has not.
- If the second could not have been written before the first was thought through, it has.
- Run the test before any sentence-level work, because rewriting the prose of a piece that circles is effort spent on material that has to be restructured anyway. The test is blunt on purpose: the answer does not depend on how good the writing is, which is why it catches the failure good writing hides.
Five ways to develop an idea
- Complication — introduce the thing that makes the simple version wrong. The strongest route and the most under-used; the finding question is who or what does not fit this?
- Consequence — ask and therefore? three times; the third answer is usually the piece.
- Contrast — set the idea against a case where it does not hold.
- Deepening — move from what happened to what it meant to what it cost. Most drafts stop at the first.
- Reversal — end opposed to where you began, having shown the route. One announced in the last paragraph reads as a twist, not a development.
A range of dimensions or viewpoints
- The Explanatory Notes name a range of dimensions or viewpoints as a form of development, and it is the instruction most often ignored.
- It means the piece holds more than one angle on its subject. A reflective piece with a single attitude from beginning to end is thin at this level, however well written.
- Where to find a second viewpoint: your past self against your present self; another person in the same event, with a different stake in it; the other side of your own argument, taken seriously; or a different scale.
- A viewpoint you have already dismissed is not a viewpoint. Two positions where one is obviously wrong is one position with decoration.
- Build the piece on the gap between the two, rather than merely including a second one. Three views, none ranked and none connected, is range without development.
- A subject you hold one settled view about has nowhere to go. Choosing subjects that can develop is covered on the choosing and drafting page.
Worked Example
Worked Example
The plan and opening of a reflective piece written for this page, "The Auction" — the writer's grandfather selling his farm.
Diagnose it, and find the development.
Answer:
Step 1 — apply the first-and-last test. Para 1's idea: it was sad when the farm was sold. Para 5's idea: it was sad, and things change. The same sentence. The piece is sustained and does not develop — every paragraph supplies a new reason for one unchanging feeling.
Step 2 — check what the middle is doing. Paras 2 to 4 all answer what else can I say about this? None answers and therefore? The piece gets broader and never gets deeper.
Step 3 — interrogate the subject for a complication. Ask who does not fit this?
- The writer visited every summer. The grandfather worked there every day for fifty-one years.
- The writer's farm is a holiday; the grandfather's is a job. So the grief may be for the writer's own childhood.
- And — the genuine complication — it is possible the grandfather was relieved.
Step 4 — re-test. Closing idea now: what I was grieving was not the farm, and the person who lost it may not have been grieving at all. Not the same sentence, and it could not have been written without the first being thought through. The piece now also satisfies a range of dimensions or viewpoints: two people, one place, incompatible relationships to it.