As I said in my last post, I've seen the Five Paragraph Essay taught/learned as a process, resulting in intellectual constipation. But it is good for something.
The Five Paragraph Essay is a model. It gives meaning, structure, and form. It’s an example of what an essay should eventually look like, emphasis on like. I tell my students that if you've just got two or three pages then five paragraphs would be okay on the final product. That’s for two or three pages. I vividly remember receiving a five page essay, however, with particularly long paragraphs. Suspiciously long, as each one conveniently ended with the page. The student had written a Five Paragraph essay for a five page essay.
It wasn’t a very well written essay. Had it been better, I probably wouldn't have noticed the paragraph to page alignment. But it seemed like the student was cramming enough information into each paragraph to make them long enough for five paragraphs in spite of the number of pages. In my feedback, I pointed this out. I don't know if s/he was trying to have exactly five paragraphs, but s/he did. I advised the student about this and reminded s/he there didn't need to be five paragraphs, especially in a five page essay.
I like telling this story in class because It lets my students know that five isn’t a magic number. There's nothing wrong with more paragraphs and there's nothing wrong with fewer, nor is there anything wrong with just five. Circumstances determine what's best.
No matter what, an essay must have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion; and each body paragraph needs to cover a different but related topic that develops ideas brought up in the introduction. This is what the Five Paragraph Essay is good for. It reminds writers of the form that their final product should resemble. Get out a book or a newspaper or a magazine and look at how those pieces of writing are broken up into paragraphs, and with more than five much of the time. Then look closer and you'll find that some of these larger publications have entire chapters entitled "Introduction" and "Conclusion." Essays have introductions and conclusions. Books have them. Blog posts have them. You'll be hard pressed to have a serious publication without introductions and conclusions in one form or another.
Just don't think that the introduction has to be the first thing written and the conclusion has to be the last.
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