Give the guide to the newcomer

A fictional opinion article about a town welcome guide. Original practice text.

The old welcome guide begins with the town's founding charter. Its next page lists six committees. The person holding it has been in town for two days and wants to know which entrance to the community centre is open after six.

The charter matters. The committees may matter too. But the order of the guide tells us whose questions were easiest to remember when it was written: those of people who no longer needed a welcome guide.

We should invite recent arrivals to help plan the next edition. They still know which ordinary arrangements are not obvious. A long-standing resident may see “the old post office” as a perfectly clear direction. Someone who arrived after it became a café sees an instruction referring to a building that apparently does not exist.

Newness is not a single point of view. A student, a parent and someone arriving to work different hours may need different information. Nor does arriving recently make every suggestion accurate. Established residents can check facts, and service providers should confirm details. The argument is for shared authorship, not replacing one supposedly complete perspective with another.

There is something uncomfortable in this proposal for those of us who consider ourselves helpful. We may discover that the explanation we have repeated for years has never answered the question being asked. That is not a reason to defend it more loudly. It is a reason to listen before printing another thousand copies.

Ask a newcomer to show you where the present guide stops helping. Begin there. A town's history can still have its place, but a welcome should be organised around the person arriving, not around the satisfaction of the people already inside.

How does the writer persuade readers that newcomers should help write the town welcome guide? Support your response with evidence from the text.