Right, I understand what themes are and what they do. But I'm not using the appearance of any theme, nor do I wish to. And I'm not going to make my hand coded site a theme either.
Like I've said I created a web-site, hand coded. I put the loop on the home page for news, and I also included it on another page where people will be writing articles.
NOW... when someone clicks on the title of the post/article... OR the link to the comments, it takes them to the single post, which like you said(and I had also assumed) is controlled my single.php. I, however do not want to use the default single.php. I want to create my own.
So using one of my own pages, I cleared the content out, opened the original single.php and copy and pasted into the content area of my site... everything from single.php that I thought I would need... And it did not work.
So what I need to do know: what exactly do I need to copy out of the original single.php into the content area of my hand coded page so that when someone wants to read just a single post it will show that single post, but while using my own designed pages.