Eight Types of Columns
1.The Description Column
Good writing requires good description. How can we hold on to what an author is saying in any piece of writing if we cannot see what the author sees, hear what he hears, taste what he tastes, smell what he smells, and touch what he touches?
Always be specific in your writing. Don’t give generalities when you…
love or hate divorce or …
the magnitude of being responsible for someone or …
the limits illness creates or …
the fear of taking orders from an inept sergeant.
You loved or hated the way your ex-spouse looked when you argued,
the way your baby smiled when you tickled him,
the way a superior gave orders in the army,
the way mossy rocks felt in the pond in your parents’ backyard.
Description writing requires that you use images from the five senses. Use sensory details that show what you are describing rather than words that merely tell your attitude.
Details that are unique to the situation are the basic units of your writing. They are the substance that allows you to gather momentum, to go on, to build a route through your material, to find closure and discovery.
2. The Narration Column
Often things happen to you that seem like a story out of a book or a movie, and you’ll want to write the story down in a way that will amuse or affects others emotionally. This is when you’ll want to write a narration column.
A narration column uses chronological organization of events to make a point. Like every column style, it uses the sensory details for good description to create a picture. These two elements (chronological organization and sensory details) allow you to build personal narration columns that explore meaningful times by both evoking the times and relating the knowledge you learned from them.
So how do you know when to start and when to stop the narration?
Writing a good story requires more than stringing events together in the order that they happened, though that is narration’s basic feature.
You’ve heard children tell you about their day, right? First this happened, then that, and then this, and so on and so on.
Where is the story in the story?
There’s got to be the point to the story, which is, naturally, where the writer discovered insight. The trip toward that insight dictates where you will start and where you will end your narration and how much time you will spend with accounts of in-between events.
If you have a topic you’re exploring, insert it into your question. For instance, “When in THIS EVENT did I lose or find something, someone, or some opportunity?”
You might remember losing your home or a friend in a divorce.
You might remember losing your way on a bicycle trip across the state.
Losing and finding go hand in hand. When something is lost, something else is usually found, and when something is found, something is usually lost.
You can start either with the finding or the losing. However, losing seems to have the most memories and feelings attached, and those feelings help you as a writer.
3. The How-To column
Everybody knows about the how-to. How-to make a cake, how-to build a house, how-to buy a dog, how-to get a date. Now, though, why would we write these things in a personal column, you ask?
There is a difference between a how-to article and a how-to personal column: When you write a personal column, you are writing about how something is done or how something is made because you want others to appreciate the process you are writing about.
You want them to understand not just the process but how the process of making or doing a particular thing has affected your life. You want them to learn that doing or making it may affect their lives.
Any instructional writing, personal or not, involves paying attention to…
a) The steps in the process you are describing
b) The order in which the steps must be performed
c) The special terms you need to understand for success
d) The tools required to do the process
e) The variations allowed in approaches
f) The signs that show a desired outcome has been achieved.
This system of organization is similar to a narration column because it contains sequence much like chronology. It contains description because you must evoke both stages in the process and objects – the five senses are, of course, involved.
Also, any how-to personal column must make clear what you are REALLY telling your readers while you are also telling them how a particular thing is made or done.
Some of the most thought-provoking how-to columns explain step by step how to do something that we actually wish we didn’t really know how to do –
how to fall in love with someone who isn’t right for us,
how to lose our hard-earned savings,
how to destroy the environment,
how to lose a wife or husband,
how to have practically no friends.
We can write to help someone we care about avoid doing things we have done. Sometimes we write about how to make something because we think others will want to make it for themselves someday. Sometimes we write how-tos for someone who had meaning in our lives to say thank you to them and to show them they were influential. We also write to understand our own experience more deeply.
4. The Compare/Contrast column
We use comparison/contrast to make choices – between jobs, consumer goods, vacations, and so on. We examine similarities and differences.
We compare an unknown to something with which we are already familiar.
We can also use comparison/contrast to learn about ourselves. For example, a person might learn more about his/her attraction to a fast car by comparing it to having a celebrity in the neighborhood.
Or you might learn more about why you like swimming in the pool better than swimming in the ocean by discussing the differences between the pool and the ocean in accessibility, temperature, and depth – you feel safer in the pool.
We use compare/contrast columns also to lead to self-discovery.
Two exercises to help you develop a C/C column are these:
a) Telling how it never was to find out how it is: If you said, “My old boyfriend was like a McDonalds,” you might find yourself writing about how unsatisfying the relationship was –
the same old menu,
the pre-spread ketchup-mustard combo that to please without taking a stand,
the flashy packaging over the skimpy meal.
The relationship was nothing like the one you wanted to have.
b) Before and after – Think about before and after pictures of a person’s house as it’s being remolded. Now think of yourself as a house – being remodeled, made over as time goes by.
5. The Classification and Division column
This column is used when you need to write to sort things out in original way.
Think about how comics say, “There are three kinds of people” and then go on to give each type a name and examples of each.
We all recognize, even subconsciously, types of people and their behaviors, as well as types of places, situations, things, and events. When we organize them according to unique categories, we impart our special point of view.
In a classification and division column, it is important to divide your subject according to a trait each group has in common.
You need to have at least three groups because otherwise you are in the realm of comparison and contrast.
Your skills with description, narration, how-to, and C/C will help you as you write to evoke and explain the categories and their differences and to move your column along.
You should always try for categories you haven’t encountered before or new ways of looking at categories that are common. Types of supermarket shoppers can be made more original by narrowing the subject, perhaps to types of cart pushers or way people accept food samples at demo tables at Sam’s.
6. The Cause and Effect column
Writing about decisions and events that have changed your life
When something happens to you, you may ask, “Why?” This is natural.
However, in our society, we are so used to using hindsight to find causes in the hopes of applying knowledge to future situations, we forget the wisdom in looking further down the road to see the effects of decisions and actions.
Sometimes there is no “why” to what a situation is doing in your life. It’s just there. It is important to discover “what” has happened in you as a result of living with or through that situation.
“What decisions or actions have I or someone else made or taken that have affected my life and what are those effects?”
You may remember your parents’ decision to move or going to summer camp.
You may think of your decision not to seek a promotion at work or a best friend moving away.
You may think of a time you were the victim of a scam.
Perhaps your parents’ move forced you to branch out and become more social.
Maybe summer camp was the worst experience in your life, and you swore you would never put your kids through the same thing.
Maybe camp, though, was great, and you decided to become a counselor.
Using the cause and effect style is valuable in personal columns, again, for self-discovery. Most of us believe that because of some certain event that happened, we are stuck and cannot change our behavior, our circumstances, or our mood. WRONG. If you apply the cause and effect thinking to personal columns, you can see how change can occur.
Again, think in specifics when you write. Approach your subject in a round-about way. Writing often works best when it is about subjects you feel less invested in.
You might have an easier time, for example, writing about the consequences of not going your high school homecoming dance than about how meeting your spouse changed your life. Writing about meeting him because you didn’t go to the dance can offer you more details than you realize.
But sometimes you do have to meet a subject head-on because until you write about it, you may not be able to write about anything else.
7. The Definition column
Writing to understand the roles you play
In a definition column, the writer explores a subject by describing the qualities that distinguish it from any other subject.
Division and classification is inherent in definition because to define something, we must identify what classification it belongs to and how it is alike and different (i.e. C/C) from other divisions. Writers often can define a subject by listing what qualities it does not have. This is a way of showing the boundaries, the uniqueness of the subject under discussion.
Writers usually offer examples to clarify their definitions. Ultimately, even how-to and cause and effect can help a writer create an extended definition column.
How something functions, for example, can be part of defining it.
The cause and effect style help with definition when the writer explores what happens as a result of having or being something.
A definition of a “bus driver” can be made by showing how one learns to be a bus driver. Defining what it means to be a daughter can include the effect of a daughter’s behavior on her parents.
Defining what it means to be a parent can include the effects of parenting (whether good or bad) on children’s lives.
What it means to be a diabetic can include how diabetics consider their diet.
8. The Argument and Persuasion column
There are times when we want to persuade others to take action or to change their thinking. Letters to the editor and op-ed sections of papers and magazines contain persuasive writing.
How do you one write effective persuasions? How do you move others to stay interested in what you have to say and perhaps change his or her mind?
- Make an assertion.
- Provide at least three reasons to support it.
- Write in an order that has a peak, a high point
- Give time to the opposing position
- Use images and details to persuade the reader instead of relying on emotionally-loaded words that tell rather than show.