When I tutored high school students, it was interesting to see their struggles with writing assignments. Most of the time, I could trace their difficulties back to the Five Paragraph Essay, or rather, the way they had been taught to write an essay.
For those unfamiliar, the five paragraph essay is as follows:
- Introduction paragraph
- 3 Body paragraphs – each of these covers a topic introduced in the introduction.
- Conclusion paragraph.
There you have it. Five paragraphs. Seems simple enough, right?
Not to the frustrated students, who were sometimes caught between a prompt and a handout comparing writing to building a sandwich. The problem was they had learned the Five Paragraph Essay as the only way to write the essay: Step one to write the introduction. Step two was paragraph 2, or body paragraph 1. Step three was paragraph 3. Do I need to continue?
The results were students who had no idea how to write. They expected their ideas to come out perfectly the first time, and they wouldn’t lay pen to page until they had something great. I saw students who were angry, frustrated, and bitter, developing a hatred of writing rather than the skill. They made for interesting tutoring sessions, to say the least. My advice for them boiled down to this: the Five Paragraph Essay is a model and not a process.
I've wondered if the insistence on the Five Paragraph Essay is a response to students saying “I don't know how to write.” Unfortunately, it leads to meandering introductions where students figure out what they’re writing about, followed by a good paragraph on the topic they spent their introduction figuring out. Having exhausted their first idea, the rest of the essay meanders before petering out in a conclusion that may or may not address the same topic as the introduction. Now with the requisite five paragraphs they forego any revision and stop with a less than ideal brainstorming session forced into prose.
It’s a tragedy that this kept students from discovering their own writing processes and developing a valuable skill. It denies experimentation and hinders the very learning it is intended to promote.
I'm starting my fourth year of teaching English composition and every class I've taught needed this lesson. Some students are liberated. For some, it's a confirmation of something they figured out already, most likely on their own. Others were so hardened against writing that they don’t even try to listen.
The Five Paragraph Essay has been poorly implemented by students and teachers. It isn’t a universal problem, as I learned when I taught Concurrent Enrollment and the students didn’t have the same issues as those I had tutored years before. But they still needed a reminder of what the Five Paragraph Essay was indeed for and its relationship to good writing.
In short, the good stuff.
Which I’ll be discussing in my next post.
