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When I taught high school English, I worked hard to help my students avoid and move beyond the five-paragraph essay. In fact, I almost went crazy trying to pull better-than-five-paragraphs-essays out of my seniors. I was apt to tell students, “you are stuck in a five-paragraph box! GET OUT OF THE BOX!”

I swore I would never, ever teach the five-paragraph essay again.

You know what happens when you speak in absolutes, right?

I am now in my second year of teaching eighth grade English–a whole different world from the near-decade of teaching upperclassmen–and I am finding myself every-so-slowly slipping into the teaching of the five-paragraph format. I actually lose sleep over this conundrum. I know it’s not the best paper style, yet these students have no sense of how to organize a paper.

Like any Type-A, over-organized ELA teacher, I made a list of what I hate…and sort of love…about using the five-paragraph essay.

Why The Five-Paragraph Essay Stinks

1.The writing is formulaic. Most essays I read in this format sound like they were written by robots, not individual students. Every essay is the same: Intro with three-point thesis, three body paragraphs that have a topic sentence, support, and examples, and a conclusion that restates the thesis. It feels like grading organization rather than thinking…because that is exactly what it is.

2.There is very little deep-analytical thinking. Students focus so much on having three points with evidence, that they don’t dig deeper into their own thoughts or considerations. They don’t do any abstract thinking because it doesn’t fit easily into the box-like format. They list the points in the thesis and give support and move on without any higher-level thinking skills. They are simply plugging information into a mold and hitting “print”.

3.It stifles creativity. Students settle on a systematic three-point thesis statement that more or less eliminates the opportunity to delve into their own inquiries and wonderings.  There is no place to play with words or break grammar rules for effect. Five-paragraph essays do not give space to adding graphics or photos. My most boisterous, opinionated student can sound like a boring, automated response when forced to use a stock writing model.

4.The writing is unremarkable. To put it more bluntly, the essays are boring. I dread reading 150 essays that are all the same because it is excruciatingly dull. In fact, when up against a deadline–like report cards being due–I find myself skimming because I am not invested at all in what my students are saying. It is not their voice, after all, it’s a humdrum, robotic drone of the five-paragraph monster.

Why I’ve Gone Back to Teaching It

1.My students need a starting point. When I taught upperclassmen, they all knew the template; my job was to help them bust free of it. I lead a revolt in writer’s workshop form that helped them get messy while writing. My eighth graders, on the other hand, look at me and blink those big, innocent doe eyes when I tell them we are writing a paper. Even with my modeling and writing with them, students were still turning in essays that were one long paragraph of mess. Teaching them introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions help them to begin to visualize what an essay should look like.

2.It’s a basic framework. Part of my learning curve becoming a middle school ELA teacher from a high school teacher was that I realized my new students didn’t know how to organize their thoughts. At all.  They had no concept of essay structure. I can’t ask them to build a house without the knowledge of how to lay a foundation. The five-paragraph essay is a basic template for the framework of an essay. It’s like showing them how to build a basic house. It’s not fancy and it doesn’t have any extra features, but it works.

3.It’s a tool rather than an absolute. As the year wore on, my 8th graders have come to know that the five-paragraph essay is a tool to organization the same way dialogue is a tool to characterization. It’s not appropriate in every situation. It is simply one way to organize a paper. For some of my lowest students who couldn’t organize a sentence much less an entire essay, this will be a tool they hold onto longer than eighth grade. For others it will be one they leave behind before the year is over.

What it really comes down to is that I need to meet my students where they are. If they need the training wheels of the five-paragraph essay, I am going to teach it to them. But great cyclists don’t win races with training wheels on, and great writers don’t write five-paragraph essays.

5 paragraph essay

Katie Sluiter is currently an 8th English teacher in West Michigan. She has taught middle school,...

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2 Comments

  1. I learned as a writer for publications and industry that every job requiring writing has templates for the routine writing done in that job. The template keeps writers from omitting to think about something essential. In the world outside the English classroom, patterns are the norm because they are efficient, which is far more important in most workplace writing than creativity.

    The five paragraph essay shouldn’t be seen as a finished product, but as a strategy for thinking though a writing problem. Taught as a pattern for thinking it works superbly well precisely because it is routine. Novice writers need routine. They can’t pay attention to what they want to say if they’re simultaneously trying to remember what to do next.

    II use what English teachers call the five-paragraph essay as the basis for strategies I teach college students. I use templates for various types of news stories when I work with reporters. I use templates when I design instructional texts for engineers.

    The reason English teachers hate the five paragraph essay is that they don’t give students enough practice using it so that they don’t need to follow it slavishly. In the hands of a skilled writer, the pattern becomes invisible.

  2. While English teachers use the 5-paragraph theme because it represents the “literary” writing that those of us who love literature want the students to participate in, it’s not the best vehicle for what the Old Guy, after 51 years of teaching, would call “research writing.”
    When doing research in most realms other than English classes, researchers wade through many pages finding significant pieces of information which they combine into a paper, thesis, dissertation, etc. which has real depth.
    Dissatisfied with the depth of analysis from my themes more than 35 years ago, the Old Guy started working with a formula to produce significant modules which could be used for both short and long writing assignments.
    While teaching speed reading for Evelyn Wood, I realized that starting from the middle with a significant quoted passage, and moving out from there produced writing that had more depth of understanding than was possible by starting with a thesis statement with very little idea of where the student might be going.
    Having taught more then 8000 students, the proof of the pudding has been my kids coming back from college or communicating directly saying, “After Andrews, college writing is easy.”
    The formula for the Old Guy’s “notepage” or the “Andrews block” goes like this: 1. Good quote with “bullability,” chosen by the teacher or by students; 2. Add Who What When Where background, with immediate background beginning with “when…”; 3. After the quote, add “Clarification,” or summary of important parts of the quote; 4. Add “Judgment,” an opinion as to whether the behavior / actions are better or worse or average when compared to the other end of the spectrum; 5. Do some research and find a “Connection,” where behavior / actions at another time or place are like the actions in the quote; 6. Add the “Thesis Statement” at the beginning which represents the precise idea that was discussed, which probably evolved as it was being discussed.
    It works… and is easy to give and grade, as it’s nicely structured. I also use a lot of computer macros inserted into their papers telling them what needs to be fixed, with no final grade until the paper is nearly perfect. It works… My website is http://www.jimteach.org.

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