Nonfiction has unique challenges with middles. A reader may notice that the body of the piece flops around in too many directions rather than delivering a muscled middle. This divergence should be addressed at the very beginning of every opinion piece by developing a focused thesis.
In my last blog post I asked and tried to answer this question: “What is poetry?” Even as I was coming to my conclusion, I realized I would need to answer another question before we went on to other things poetic: “What is a poem?”.
Middles have a way of sagging. I’m talking about books, of course!
(adapted from http://www.coloring.ws/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.coloring.ws/animals/horses/horse7.gif)