Friend or Foe Part 2: What’s Good About the Five Paragraph Essay

Part 2: What’s Good About the Five Paragraph Essay.

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.

Friend or Foe Part 1: The Five Paragraph Essay

Part 1: Why I Hate the Five Paragraph Essay.

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.