Why the 5 Paragraph Essay?
Every teacher has that teacher: the teacher who made you want to be a teacher yourself. For me, that was Eric MacKnight, who taught my World Literature class when I was a senior at South Salem High School back in the 1981-82 school year. We didn’t have a 30-year old, tattered textbook in that class; instead, we bought our own copies of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. I still have that book somewhere in my office. We were allowed to buy the books so that we could mark in them the ways that college students do, because they’ve bought their textbooks. It meant a lot to me (and, I assume, my classmates) that we were not still being treated like little kids; rather, it was like we were being allowed to take a few steps gingerly into a new realm.
I say all of this only to emphasize my immense respect for Eric, because I’m going to disagree with him about a blog post he wrote earlier today. He writes to defend the 5 paragraph essay, and makes good points. I won’t say that writing any form, including the 5 paragraph essay, is likely to do lasting harm to a student, in and of itself. Many students simply don’t write at all, and that’s far worse that writing 5 paragraph essays. But what I question is the pervasiveness of this form, or of any similar formulaic “academic” essay. In fact, we were talking about this (and came to no consensus among participants) at the Northern California Writing Project‘s Summer Institute today. My major question is this: why does this form, which is rarely if ever used by actual writers (even academics), have such a privileged position in schooling? Originally, the essay (as begun by Montaigne) was (as its name indicated) an “attempt” at finding meaning through speculation and reflection. Now, it’s a form that frowns on speculation and reflection, instead requiring its writers to think narrowly and defend, at all costs, its thesis.
There’s a chapter in Bruce Pirie’s book Reinventing High School English called “‘Mind-Forged Manacles’: The Academic Essay” that I highly recommend; in it, he describes alternative ways to think about this thesis-centric approach to writing. In a nutshell, Pirie argues that the focus on one narrow aspect of a topic serves to blind the writer to a broader view of the issue at hand. Such a broader viewpoint could be useful in understanding the role of the topic in the political landscape, to the benefit of writer, reader, and community. It’s a little like what Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, calls “horizontal violence”–when people who have many more commonalities than differences argue among themselves rather than uniting. It serves particular political ends to have us look at things under a microscope rather than through a wide-angle lens.
The real source of my concerns about the 5 paragraph essay, or any other specified formula for writing academic prose, is that it removes from the student the responsibility of structuring the writing. Why should we believe that any topic we happen to want to write about is capable of being shoehorned into 5 paragraphs, rather than trust that as writers we will be able to determine how many paragraphs will serve the purpose? Figuring out where to break a paragraph isn’t an exact science; while I was drafting this, for instance, the second and third paragraphs were just one paragraph, and I decided to break it into two at the point when I start using Pirie’s chapter as an example. Is this the “right” place to break? I haven’t looked at many of my published articles or book chapters to see if I’ve “correctly” paragraphed them, or even to see if my paragraphs have topic sentences and/or the requisite number of supporting details and commentary. But none of the editors I’ve worked with have ever asked me to rework anything based on paragraphing, either–although I’ve been asked to revise every published piece except one.
And now (as I begin my fifth, and, ironically, most likely final paragraph in this attempt to articulate my thoughts about formulaic writing), it seems that my point is to say that students need to be taught to structure, not taught a structure. They need to know that, if they write about an example of something (by inserting a quotation from a text, for instance, or by referencing an incident from their experience), they also need to inform their audience of the significance of that example to the point(s) they’re making. They need to know that, somewhere in the beginning of their writing (but not necessarily in the first paragraph), their readers will expect to learn about the topic and purpose of the writing. But why not learn that from reading real writers instead of from a lockstep formula?
June 22 2009 11:00 pm | NCWP and Teaching and Work
Hi Pete,
First, you are too kind. (But I still have my copy, too.)
Of course I agree with everything you say, almost. But I have the feeling that, having been away from American schooling for a very long time, I am missing some context. You make it sound as if the *only* kind of essay-writing students do is 5-paragraph essays, which makes me believe that you are arguing against a practice, common in American schools, in which the only essay-writing students do is 5-paragraph essays. If this is the case, I am of course completely on your side of the argument. I wouldn’t defend, either, making sonnets the sole form of poetry studied in school. Nor would I support a music program in which students never play anything but scales.
But is this really what goes on?
I use the 5-paragraph form, sometimes, as a way to make the skeleton of a persuasive essay clear and explicit. But the vast majority of writing my students do is their own work, structured by them, as you say, in which they struggle with all the choices that writers struggle with.
I feel as if I have stumbled into a strange country in which hammers are used routinely to commit unspeakable crimes, and have naively asked, ‘What’s wrong with a hammer? It’s a pretty good tool if you need to drive nails into wood.”
Which, I guess, brings me back to bad teaching. If a carpenter were to use only a hammer to measure, saw, plane, sand, and paint, he would be a bad carpenter. But don’t blame the hammer.
The hammer analogy: brilliant and, unfortunately, accurate. With the emphasis on standardized testing in the US, the formulaic and often flavorless 5 paragraph essay has taken a position of prominence because it enables students to craft something that will, fairly predictably, garner a 2 or above on the typical 4-point essay scoring rubrics. Because administrators (and, consequently, teachers) are under such pressure to have high test scores, this kind of writing becomes, too often, the only kind of writing students do. It’s not as though teachers want to limit their teaching of writing to formulaic expository pieces, but we’re suffering a serious bout of simultaneous curricular bloat. With less room overall for writing, the writing that stays is the kind that counts on standardized tests.
We’re also suffering from a very limited viewpoint, fostered under No Child Left Behind, of what counts in terms of research on literacy. Fortunately, the new Education Administration seems to take a broader view of learning outcomes and research, and some changes in assumptions may soon appear. We’ll see. I’m hopeful that we can actually be able to think about, and engage with, the kinds of pedagogies that give students a full complement of tools, rather than just the hammer.
I’m so sorry to have my suspicions confirmed.
I suppose nationwide adoption of the IB curriculum (K-12) would be too simple a solution.
Sigh.
I’m coming this a bit late, but as a teacher of college writing for twenty-seven years I’d thought I’d chime in. The problem with the five-paragraph essay is that it is often taught poorly–in textbooks as well as classrooms. It encourages “listing” of supports rather than organizing them.
While many of my colleagues–in various disciplines–are fond of chiding their first-year students to “grow out of” the five-paragraph form, I encourage mine to embrace the five-PART form, in which they have a three-part body, one that encourages dialectical thinking, provides room for debate and an analysis of first assumptions, and so on. While it’s not the only way to structure an essay, it’s a good way to begin thinking about the relationship between WHAT you want to write and HOW you’re going to do it.
(This conviction began in grad school when, looking over Ph.D. dissertations in the library, I noticed that many of them contained five chapters. Spooky, but true: five dies hard!)