The five-paragraph essay is a time-honored formula for student essay writing: generations of students arrive in college with the formula under their belts. Every year, at the beginning of our first-year writing-intensive classes, we ask students whatan essay looks like, and every year, they say the same thing:
● Thesis (which encapsulates everything the writer will say in the essay)
● Body paragraphs (each supporting the big idea offered in the thesis)
● Conclusion (which restates the thesis
We understand why the five-paragraph essay persists. It’s a clear, organized structure; it demonstrates that students have read the text and can find material in it to support their points; it’s easy to evaluate and it can be taught consistently from classroom to classroom, in schools and colleges. And given the exigencies of testing culture in the schools, we understand how these qualities have come to be so valued.
And, as we’ve been told by teachers, it’s often what seems possible and practical in stressed teaching situations, in overburdened high school or college classrooms where student preparation varies widely and profs have upwards of 30 students.
We understand all that—but we think that we can do better.
And the reason we need to do better is because the five-paragraph essay has some serious drawbacks.
● It’s not a narrative. Instead of a sequence that builds from idea to idea, the five-paragraph essay involves a series of often unrelated points, stated in the thesis, then connected with “connecting words” instead of meaningful narrative links that build on one another.
● It’s repetitive: as students tell us, you say what you’re going to say, then you say it, then you say what you said. Repetition doesn’t make an idea more convincing: the way we convince each other of things is by telling stories, in one way or another.
● It values product over process, answers over questions: Since you begin with a big statement, support it and restate it, there’s no space for exploring or developing ideas. You’re just writing down is what you already know.
● It’s boring to read and boring to write. And boring is bad for students and for teachers. When students tell us that they “hate writing,” what they really mean, more often than not, is that they hate doing the kind of rote work the five-paragraph essay requires. When there’s no space to think through ideas, writing begins to feel like busywork.
● It leads students into obvious or general thesis statements: Students often learn to begin with the thesis and then write the essay from there, which means they start out with an assumption and then find evidence to support what they already think. That makes it hard to come up with anything besides the most general, overarching theses.
● It makes students think there’s a right answer and that their job is to find it. And that not only makes students anxious about finding that answer, it discourages them from taking risks in their thinking and trying out new ideas.
All of the above make the five-paragraph essay bad for students and teachers. It’s bad for us as a society, too. After all, the skills the five-paragraph essay reinforces--rote learning, identification and repetition of information, rigid structure--are the opposite of those our young workers will need in the new economy. To prepare themselves for the entrepreneurial, constantly shifting working world they need analysis, question-asking, risk-taking. The way you show value in this economy isn’t by knowing facts but by having ideas about them.
But if the five-paragraph essay isn’t useful, what are teachers to do? Is it possible to build a model that that requires question asking, investigation and analysis--and that works for a wide range of students?
We think the answer lies in focusing on process rather than product, and in beginning with questions in order to create a narrative essay with a real argument.
This model asks students to begin not from what they already know, but from what they don’t know. We ask them to investigate things that they don’t understand or that don’t make sense to them; to look closely at the text for evidence, float possibilities, make choices, ask more questions, test out their ideas in writing. We ask students to arrive at arguments or claims through a process of investigation, rather than beginning with the claim and then finding evidence to support what they already think.
This focus on the process of writing means that a student can’t start writing her essays by sitting down at the computer and beginning at the beginning. Instead, she starts out by doing a lot of writing activities that look nothing like the final product. Because if you’re really thinking, really investigating and asking questions, you can’t be creating a well-structured, grammatically clean product at the same time. Thinking is messy.
The essay, then, is not a display of mastery, but a narrative which, true to the original meaning of essay (to try), sets out to convince its reader of the claim that student has arrived at. It does so by taking the reader through a cleaned-up version of the writer’s thinking process. It tells a story that moves from point to point; it foregrounds discoveries; it arrives somewhere different than it started. It works for all kinds of students, from all kinds of backgrounds, because it gives them space to think and ways and means of figuring things out. (We know this because we’ve used this process students from the best-prepared prep school graduates to developmental learners, students with significant learning disabilities and ESL learners.)
This process isn’t easy, and in the early stages it can require more hands-on work by teacher and student. But it gives students the skills they need to think hard, make choices, analyze—the skills they need in our brave new hyper-connected world. And it’s not boring for the teacher—or for the student.