Hello, and welcome to strategy five, which is the next section of the course. The next section includes purpose in presentation. Purpose is strategy five in presentation is strategy six, strategy five purpose states plan your work around one key idea or question. So basically the gist of that is to have one clear main idea in your piece. There are exceptions to that like anything but most of the time regardless of your genre, you will have one key idea around your piece and it may be a direct thesis statement depending on your genre, like if it's not fiction or an essay, but it may also be more subtle than that even in fiction though, you want to have a central theme or a central idea, a central event or something, some key idea or question that the whole piece revolves around and so planning your work around one key idea or question is employed And an explanation for that, for example, in fiction, or nonfiction generally, it does have a main idea consider this the engine that pulls the train along, or consider it, the thread that runs through the whole work to create a unifying element throughout the piece.

So those are two metaphors that a lot of people can understand. I like to think of it as a train, and it's the engine that pulls the train along and all of the cars that come behind the train are in some way connected to it. There's something that keeps them connected or linked together. And then at the end, the caboose is still connected, because if there's a disconnect, then the engine may exist, but it's going to pull along and leave some of the cars behind. So it's really important to have that unifying element that goes through all of your work for technique one, in a work of fiction, for example, the character has a driving need to create something she doesn't have to eliminate something she doesn't Want or to change a condition for the better, or maybe to get something that she, like I said something that she doesn't have that she would like to have.

A very well known example would be gone with the wind and going with the wind, Scarlett O'Hara. She's one of the most. She's a very, she's a vixen, that's for sure. She's one of the most famous characters and flaw characters in American fiction. But she's also one of the most complex and intriguing characters. And while she has good qualities, one of the things about her notorious character is that she pursues Ashley Wilkes, and a lot of times to her own expense at the expense of love at the expense of true happiness.

And after the war, she vowed never to do without money again. And so we see how that driving force of what she wants, pushes her and motivates her throughout the movie, and throughout the film and throughout the book, and we see how Complex her character is and how that causes her a lot of pain and how she takes for granted the people right in front of her that love her in pursuit of these forces, and once she has one of them, she forgets that about it. And she just continues to pursue it, even though she doesn't have to pursue it in that way anymore. And once she realizes the irony at the end, it just creates all this tension and all this friction throughout the piece. But her will to achieve those goals drives her with a force that she doesn't understand at times, and often at the expense of real love and happiness.

And so that's just an example in fiction have a central theme or a central focus, that of that thread that unifies all the events in the storyline. And like I said, in nonfiction, that could be a thesis and everything else in that when in some way point back to that support that or summarize that in some way. So the unifying work, or key idea or key question Question that drives a piece should be present in most pieces of fiction and nonfiction and that is technique one of strategy five