why is the five paragraph essay bad

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Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and Donald Trump

This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact .

Project 2025 has a starring role in this week’s Democratic National Convention.

And it was front and center on Night 1.

WATCH: Hauling large copy of Project 2025, Michigan state Sen. McMorrow speaks at 2024 DNC

“This is Project 2025,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, said as she laid a hardbound copy of the 900-page document on the lectern. “Over the next four nights, you are going to hear a lot about what is in this 900-page document. Why? Because this is the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has warned Americans about “Trump’s Project 2025” agenda — even though former President Donald Trump doesn’t claim the conservative presidential transition document.

“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said July 23 in Milwaukee. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously, and can you believe they put that thing in writing?”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, has joined in on the talking point.

“Don’t believe (Trump) when he’s playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Walz said Aug. 9 in Glendale, Arizona.

Trump’s campaign has worked to build distance from the project, which the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, led with contributions from dozens of conservative groups.

Much of the plan calls for extensive executive-branch overhauls and draws on both long-standing conservative principles, such as tax cuts, and more recent culture war issues. It lays out recommendations for disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, eliminating certain climate protections and consolidating more power to the president.

Project 2025 offers a sweeping vision for a Republican-led executive branch, and some of its policies mirror Trump’s 2024 agenda, But Harris and her presidential campaign have at times gone too far in describing what the project calls for and how closely the plans overlap with Trump’s campaign.

PolitiFact researched Harris’ warnings about how the plan would affect reproductive rights, federal entitlement programs and education, just as we did for President Joe Biden’s Project 2025 rhetoric. Here’s what the project does and doesn’t call for, and how it squares with Trump’s positions.

Are Trump and Project 2025 connected?

To distance himself from Project 2025 amid the Democratic attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he “knows nothing” about it and has “no idea” who is in charge of it. (CNN identified at least 140 former advisers from the Trump administration who have been involved.)

The Heritage Foundation sought contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations for its policy vision for the next Republican presidency, which was published in 2023.

Project 2025 is now winding down some of its policy operations, and director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, is stepping down, The Washington Post reported July 30. Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita denounced the document.

WATCH: A look at the Project 2025 plan to reshape government and Trump’s links to its authors

However, Project 2025 contributors include a number of high-ranking officials from Trump’s first administration, including former White House adviser Peter Navarro and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

A recently released recording of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author and the former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, showed Vought saying Trump’s “very supportive of what we do.” He said Trump was only distancing himself because Democrats were making a bogeyman out of the document.

Project 2025 wouldn’t ban abortion outright, but would curtail access

The Harris campaign shared a graphic on X that claimed “Trump’s Project 2025 plan for workers” would “go after birth control and ban abortion nationwide.”

The plan doesn’t call to ban abortion nationwide, though its recommendations could curtail some contraceptives and limit abortion access.

What’s known about Trump’s abortion agenda neither lines up with Harris’ description nor Project 2025’s wish list.

Project 2025 says the Department of Health and Human Services Department should “return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”

It recommends that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its 2000 approval of mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion. Medication is the most common form of abortion in the U.S. — accounting for around 63 percent in 2023.

If mifepristone were to remain approved, Project 2025 recommends new rules, such as cutting its use from 10 weeks into pregnancy to seven. It would have to be provided to patients in person — part of the group’s efforts to limit access to the drug by mail. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to mifepristone’s FDA approval over procedural grounds.

WATCH: Trump’s plans for health care and reproductive rights if he returns to White House The manual also calls for the Justice Department to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act on mifepristone, which bans the mailing of “obscene” materials. Abortion access supporters fear that a strict interpretation of the law could go further to ban mailing the materials used in procedural abortions, such as surgical instruments and equipment.

The plan proposes withholding federal money from states that don’t report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention how many abortions take place within their borders. The plan also would prohibit abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funds. It also calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the training of medical professionals, including doctors and nurses, omits abortion training.

The document says some forms of emergency contraception — particularly Ella, a pill that can be taken within five days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy — should be excluded from no-cost coverage. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services, which involves a range of birth control methods, including emergency contraception.

Trump has recently said states should decide abortion regulations and that he wouldn’t block access to contraceptives. Trump said during his June 27 debate with Biden that he wouldn’t ban mifepristone after the Supreme Court “approved” it. But the court rejected the lawsuit based on standing, not the case’s merits. He has not weighed in on the Comstock Act or said whether he supports it being used to block abortion medication, or other kinds of abortions.

Project 2025 doesn’t call for cutting Social Security, but proposes some changes to Medicare

“When you read (Project 2025),” Harris told a crowd July 23 in Wisconsin, “you will see, Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

The Project 2025 document does not call for Social Security cuts. None of its 10 references to Social Security addresses plans for cutting the program.

Harris also misleads about Trump’s Social Security views.

In his earlier campaigns and before he was a politician, Trump said about a half-dozen times that he’s open to major overhauls of Social Security, including cuts and privatization. More recently, in a March 2024 CNBC interview, Trump said of entitlement programs such as Social Security, “There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.” However, he quickly walked that statement back, and his CNBC comment stands at odds with essentially everything else Trump has said during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump’s campaign website says that not “a single penny” should be cut from Social Security. We rated Harris’ claim that Trump intends to cut Social Security Mostly False.

Project 2025 does propose changes to Medicare, including making Medicare Advantage, the private insurance offering in Medicare, the “default” enrollment option. Unlike Original Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans have provider networks and can also require prior authorization, meaning that the plan can approve or deny certain services. Original Medicare plans don’t have prior authorization requirements.

The manual also calls for repealing health policies enacted under Biden, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. The law enabled Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers for the first time in history, and recently resulted in an agreement with drug companies to lower the prices of 10 expensive prescriptions for Medicare enrollees.

Trump, however, has said repeatedly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he will not cut Medicare.

Project 2025 would eliminate the Education Department, which Trump supports

The Harris campaign said Project 2025 would “eliminate the U.S. Department of Education” — and that’s accurate. Project 2025 says federal education policy “should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” The plan scales back the federal government’s role in education policy and devolves the functions that remain to other agencies.

Aside from eliminating the department, the project also proposes scrapping the Biden administration’s Title IX revision, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also would let states opt out of federal education programs and calls for passing a federal parents’ bill of rights similar to ones passed in some Republican-led state legislatures.

Republicans, including Trump, have pledged to close the department, which gained its status in 1979 within Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s presidential Cabinet.

In one of his Agenda 47 policy videos, Trump promised to close the department and “to send all education work and needs back to the states.” Eliminating the department would have to go through Congress.

What Project 2025, Trump would do on overtime pay

In the graphic, the Harris campaign says Project 2025 allows “employers to stop paying workers for overtime work.”

The plan doesn’t call for banning overtime wages. It recommends changes to some Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulations and to overtime rules. Some changes, if enacted, could result in some people losing overtime protections, experts told us.

The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).” This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In 2019, the Trump’s administration finalized a rule that expanded overtime pay eligibility to most salaried workers earning less than about $35,568, which it said made about 1.3 million more workers eligible for overtime pay. The Trump-era threshold is high enough to cover most line workers in lower-cost regions, Project 2025 said.

The Biden administration raised that threshold to $43,888 beginning July 1, and that will rise to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025. That would grant overtime eligibility to about 4 million workers, the Labor Department said.

It’s unclear how many workers Project 2025’s proposal to return to the Trump-era overtime threshold in some parts of the country would affect, but experts said some would presumably lose the right to overtime wages.

Other overtime proposals in Project 2025’s plan include allowing some workers to choose to accumulate paid time off instead of overtime pay, or to work more hours in one week and fewer in the next, rather than receive overtime.

Trump’s past with overtime pay is complicated. In 2016, the Obama administration said it would raise the overtime to salaried workers earning less than $47,476 a year, about double the exemption level set in 2004 of $23,660 a year.

But when a judge blocked the Obama rule, the Trump administration didn’t challenge the court ruling. Instead it set its own overtime threshold, which raised the amount, but by less than Obama.

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Guest Essay

Surgeon General: Parents Are at Their Wits’ End. We Can Do Better.

By Vivek H. Murthy

Dr. Murthy is the surgeon general.

One day when my daughter was a year old, she stopped moving her right leg. Tests found that she had a deep infection in her thigh that was dangerously close to her bone. She was rushed off to surgery. Thankfully, she’s now a healthy, spirited young girl, but the excruciating days we spent in the hospital were some of the hardest of my life. My wife, Alice, and I felt helpless and heartbroken. We got through it because of excellent medical care, understanding workplaces and loved ones who showed up and reminded us that we were not alone.

When I became a parent, a friend told me I was signing up for a lifetime of joy and worry. The joys are indeed abundant, but as fulfilling as parenting has been, the truth is it has also been more stressful than any job I’ve had. I’ve had many moments of feeling lost and exhausted. So many parents I encounter as I travel across America tell me they have the same experience: They feel lucky to be raising kids, but they are struggling, often in silence and alone.

The stress and mental health challenges faced by parents — just like loneliness , workplace well-being and the impact of social media on youth mental health — aren’t always visible, but they can take a steep toll. It’s time to recognize they constitute a serious public health concern for our country. Parents who feel pushed to the brink deserve more than platitudes. They need tangible support. That’s why I am issuing a surgeon general’s advisory to call attention to the stress and mental health concerns facing parents and caregivers and to lay out what we can do to address them.

A recent study by the American Psychological Association revealed that 48 percent of parents say most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared with 26 percent of other adults who reported the same. They are navigating traditional hardships of parenting — worrying about money and safety, struggling to get enough sleep — as well as new stressors, including omnipresent screens, a youth mental health crisis and widespread fear about the future.

Stress is tougher to manage when you feel you’re on your own, which is why it’s particularly concerning that so many parents, single parents most of all, report feeling lonelier than other adults . Additionally, parents are stretched for time. Compared with just a few decades ago, mothers and fathers spend more time working and more time caring for their children , leaving them less time for rest, leisure and relationships. Stress, loneliness and exhaustion can easily affect people’s mental health and well-being. And we know that the mental health of parents has a direct impact on the mental health of children.

All of this is compounded by an intensifying culture of comparison, often amplified online, that promotes unrealistic expectations of what parents must do. Chasing these expectations while trying to wade through an endless stream of parenting advice has left many families feeling exhausted, burned out and perpetually behind.

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Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Writing > The pros and cons of the five-paragraph essay

The pros and cons of the five-paragraph essay

The five-paragraph essay is a writing structure typically taught in high school. Structurally, it consists of an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. This clear structure helps students connect points into a succinct argument. It’s a great introductory structure, but only using this writing formula has its limitations.

What is a five-paragraph essay?

Outside of the self-titled structure, the five-paragraph essay has additional rules. To start, your introductory paragraph should include a hook to captivate your audience. It should also introduce your thesis , or the argument you are proving. The thesis should be one sentence, conclude your introductory paragraph, and include supporting points. These points will become the body of your essay. The body paragraphs should introduce a specific point, include examples and supporting information, and then conclude. This process is repeated until you reach the fifth concluding paragraph, in which you summarize your essay.

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The benefits of a five-paragraph essay

• Your ideas are clear. Presenting your ideas in a succinct, organized manner makes them easy to understand and the five-paragraph essay is designed for that. It provides a clear outline to follow. And most importantly, it’s organized around the thesis, so the argument can be traced from the beginning of the essay to its conclusion. When learning how to write essays, losing track of your thesis can be a common mistake. By using this structure, it’s harder to go on tangents. Each of your points are condensed into a single paragraph. If you struggle presenting your ideas, following this structure might be your best bet.
• It’s simple. Creating an essay structure takes additional brainpower and time to craft. If an essay is timed in an exam, relying on this method is helpful. You can quickly convey your ideas so you can spend more time writing and less structuring your essay.
• It helps build your writing skills. If you’re new to writing essays, this is a great tool. Since the structure is taken care of, you can practice writing and build your skills. Learn more writing tips to improve your essays.

The cons of writing a five-paragraph essay

• The structure is rigid. Depending on its usage, the structure and convention of the five paragraphs can make creating an essay easier to understand and write. However, for writing outside of a traditional high school essay, this format can be limiting. To illustrate points creatively, you might want to create a different structure to illustrate your argument.
• Writing becomes repetitive. This format quickly becomes repetitive. Moving from body-to-body paragraph using the same rules and format creates a predictable rhythm. Reading this predictable format can become dull. And if you’re writing for a college professor, they will want you to showcase creativity in your writing. Try using a different essay structure to make your writing more interesting
• Lack of transitions. Quickly moving through ideas in a five-paragraph structure essay doesn’t always leave room for transitions. The structure is too succinct. Each paragraph only leaves enough space for a writer to broadly delve into an idea and then move onto the next. In longer essays, you can use additional paragraphs to connect ideas. Without transitions, essays in this format can feel choppy, as each point is detached from the previous one
• Its rules can feel unnecessary. Breaking your essay into three body paragraphs keeps it concise. But is three the perfect number of body paragraphs? Some arguments might need more support than three points to substantiate them. Limiting your argument to three points can weaken its credibility and can feel arbitrary for a writer to stick to.

Creating essays using the five-paragraph structure is situational. Use your best judgement to decide when to take advantage of this essay formula. If you’re writing on a computer with Microsoft Word , try using Microsoft Editor to edit your essay.

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Kill the 5-Paragraph Essay

By  John Warner

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Let’s just go ahead and kill the 5-paragraph essay at all levels, everywhere.

Seriously. Let’s end it. We can have essays that happen to be 5-paragraphs long, but there shall be no more “5-paragraph essays.”

That just about everyone reading this is well-familiar with the 5-paragraph essay is a testament to why it needs to be retired, and by retired, I mean killed dead, double-tap zombie-style, lest it rise again.

The 5-paragraph essay is indeed a genre, but one that is entirely uncoupled from anything resembling meaningful work when it comes to developing a fully mature writing process. If writing is like exercise, the 5-paragraph essay is more Ab Belt than sit-up.

A significant portion of the opening weeks of my first-year writing class is spent “deprogramming” students from following the “rules” they’ve been taught in order to succeed on the 5-paragraph essay and opening them up to the world of “choice” that confronts them when tackling “writing related problems” that they face in college and beyond. They cannot hope to develop unless and until we first undo the damage done.

There will be some who want to defend the 5-paragraph essay as “training wheels” for the type of academic writing that will come later. You’ve got to know the rules to break the rules, right?

Not really. At least not these rules, and the way students learn them. While a well-done 5-paragraph essay may exhibit some traits that we value in other forms of writing – engaging opening, clear focus/thesis, transitions between ideas, general coherence – the writing of a 5-paragraph essay is primarily approached from a tactical angle, and occurs outside a genuine rhetorical situation (audience/purpose/message). Because of this, students write from a list of rules handed down by their teachers, starting with the form itself (five paragraphs: intro, body, body, body, conclusion), and including specifics like the use of “good” transition words, never using “I” or contractions, and even limits on the number of sentences per paragraph or words per sentence.

The result is a Frankenstein’s monster of an “essay,” something that looks vaguely essay-like, but is clearly also not as it lurches and moans across the landscape, frightening the villagers.

More troublesome is what the 5-paragraph essay does to the writing process. The act of writing is primarily treated as a performance meant to impress a teacher or score well on a standardized exam. It fosters a number of counterproductive behaviors, not the least of which is the temptation to write in “pseudo-academic B.S.,” a lot of academic-seeming sound and fury signifying nothing, which becomes a very hard habit for students to break [1] .

If the 5-paragraph essay were good training for writing college-level academic essays, you wouldn’t hear so much carping from college instructors about the quality of writing from their students.

Mature writers need to navigate choices rooted in genuine rhetorical situations. They must consider audience, purpose, and message. The 5-paragraph essay requires none of this.

Kill it dead.

But what should we replace it with?

The most important essay I ever wrote was in 3 rd grade.

My teacher, Mrs. Goldman, told us we needed to write directions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She never used the word “essay” because that would’ve been meaningless to us, but this was actually a “process” or “how-to” essay, and to write a good one, you need to think very carefully about what you’re telling your audience.

We were 3 rd graders, so of course, we didn’t do this. The extent to which we didn’t became apparent next class when Mrs. Goldman brought in the necessary supplies for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then told us we had to make our sandwiches exactly according to our directions .

If you forgot to mention that you needed bread on which to spread the peanut butter, you smeared it on the plate. If you wrote to spread peanut butter on a slice of bread, but didn’t say to use a knife, we were instructed to use our hands.

I don’t think anyone in the class managed to create an edible sandwich, but we had a lot of fun laughing at the attempts, and the memory is indelible. That day, I learned that writers need to be careful with their words because if someone is asked to follow them, things can go very very wrong.

Mrs. Goldman was teaching us a number of different things, genre awareness, audience, structure and sequencing. None of it had anything to do with a standardized assessment. We were solving a writing-related problem. Most of all, we were absorbing the lesson that above all, writing is done for audiences.

Even the old-fashioned “book report” is superior to the 5-paragraph essay as a tool for developing writers and writing, as it embraces audience and purpose, i.e., tell someone about the book you just read and whether or not they should read it too. A book report is the solution to a genuine writing-related problem.

The steady encroachment of standardized assessment on education and learning has only exacerbated the damage of the 5-paragraph essay. If the 5-paragraph essay was only one genre among many, we could safely contain the contagion, but as it is the easiest form to assess, it is now the monolith at the center of the English classroom.

It is a spirit killer for both students and teachers. For those who are fans of so-called “accountability” in education, it is actually the tool that allows the worst teachers to hide amongst the good, as it’s incredibly easy to game with hacks, tips, and tricks.

So let’s free ourselves from the 5-paragraph essay. Yes, the aftermath may be a little messy and the testing companies will have to think of something else – a feature, not a bug as far as I’m concerned – but we might just realize that good writing requires a lot of curiosity, and at least a little bit of freedom.

At this point, what do we have to lose? 

[1] Ask your students how many of them do the “right-click” thesaurus trick on their essays, where they swap in 10 dollar words suggested by their software in order to raise the apparent sophistication of the vocabulary in the essay.

Student Wellness Tip: Investing in Graduate Student Mental Health

Campus leaders at Ohio State University are using state funding to bolster resources and services for graduate

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Why the Five-Paragraph Essay is a Problem Now—and Later

Belief #1: The five-paragraph essay is a problem now

Current common approaches for teaching writing are simultaneously too punishing and not nearly challenging enough. Part of the problem is how “rigor” is viewed in education. “Rigor” means “strictness” and “severity.” It is an artifact of a different time and a different mentality toward schooling. It remains popular mostly as a way to invoke days of yore that are supposedly better than today. . . . When students say a class was “hard,” they often mean “confusing” or “arbitrary,” rather than stimulating and challenging. (2018, 142)

We would add the following to the list of arbitrary and confusing approaches to teaching writing: rules that demand paragraphs will contain five (or nine or whatever) sentences; the topic sentence will always be first in each paragraph; and the thesis or claim must always be directly stated in the introduction. These rules do not represent excellence in writing. On the contrary: in many cases, adhering to them wrings the goodness out of writing. The writer is punished by being shoehorned into a form. Peter Elbow, noted writing researcher, argues that “the five-paragraph essay tends to function as an anti-perplexity machine” (2012, 308). Katherine Bomer agrees, adding, “There is no room for the untidiness of inquiry or complexity and therefore no energy in the writing” (2016, xi). Not only is energy drained from the writing when students practice mechanized thinking, but students also lose the valuable practice of generating and organizing ideas. When the form is predetermined, much of the writer’s important decision-making has already been stripped, which is one reason Penny is now encountering so many college students who believe they cannot solve their own writing problems.

We agree with John Warner’s notion that approaches taken by writing teachers are “not nearly challenging enough” (2018, 142). The form does the thinking for the student, and the student simply plugs in and follows. Without an understanding of options, students can’t imagine how a different form might better engage an audience or how changing the structure might better communicate their ideas. Teachers in high school rarely (if ever) meet across content areas to consider how often students are writing the exact same formulaic essays. The teachers at our schools never met to have these discussions. Students need numerous opportunities to study the various forms an essay can take, and they need repeated practice experimenting. This is not our only objection, however. The lack of student decision-making and agency is compounded when students are constrained by the teacher’s choice of subject and the lack of an authentic audience for their writing. We like how novelist Lily King explains the problems with standardized essays about books:

While you’re reading [the book] rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. . . . I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. . . . Questions like [man versus nature] are designed to pull you completely out of the story. . . . Why would you want to pull kids out of the story? You want to push them further in, so they can feel everything the author tried so hard to create for them. (2020, 271)

Night has fallen and is swirling and twirling around me. Gold chains hang across his neckline like trophies against a prize. The fine oil paintings and white pillars line sunken walls. It is a life filled with artificial riches, swishing like change in a pocket of hope. And the noises it made rustled in our dreams.

Abby writes with verve and authenticity. Jillian, the same age, is sitting in a first-year college classroom without the skill set to make the decisions expected of her. And we know this: students get to Abby’s level of essay writing when they’ve experienced a lot of practice in struggling with generating ideas and organizing their thinking. The road to excellence is rife with trial and error. It is up to us to entrust our young writers to wrestle with their decisions. Doing so matters now. And later.

Penny Kittle teaches freshman composition at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. She was a teacher and literacy coach in public schools for 34 years, 21 of those spent at Kennett High School in North Conway. She is the co-author (with Kelly Gallagher) of   Four Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency , as well as the bestselling  180 Days .

Penny is the author of  Book Love  and  Write Beside Them , which won the NCTE James Britton award. She also co-authored two books with her mentor, Don Graves, and co-edited (with Tom Newkirk) a collection of Graves’ work,  Children Want to Write .  She is the president of the Book Love Foundation and was given the Exemplary Leader Award from NCTE’s Conference on English Leadership. In the summer Penny teaches graduate students at the University of New Hampshire Literacy Institutes.  Throughout the year, she travels across the U.S. and Canada (and once in awhile quite a bit farther) speaking to teachers about empowering students through independence in literacy. She believes in curiosity, engagement, and deep thinking in schools for both students and their teachers. Penny stands on the shoulders of her mentors, the Dons (Murray & Graves), and the Toms (Newkirk & Romano), in her belief that intentional teaching in a reading and writing workshop brings the greatest student investment and learning in a classroom.

Learn more about Penny Kittle on her websites,   pennykittle.net   and   booklovefoundation.org , or follow her on   twitter .

Topics: Penny Kittle , Creative Writing , Kelly Gallagher , Teaching Writing

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The Five-Paragraph Essay: 5 Reasons Why It Still Relevant?

The age-old five-paragraph essay elicits many things from students: mostly, a creative variety of groans and eye-rolls. An exasperated student might inquire: “Haven’t we done this before, like, a million times? Why do we have to keep on doing this?”

While there are so many reasons for why we as teachers need to move our students beyond the five paragraph essay, it is also essential for writing instruction. Don’t let students catch you off guard. Here are five reasons why the five-paragraph essay is still a critical tool for students’ development as writers and thinkers.

Five reasons why the five-paragraph essay is still relevant

1. its function and form can be applied to anything and everything..

So, it really doesn’t matter what the contents of these thoughts maybe – they can be about A Clockwork Orange, or Euclidean geometry, or the Scopes Monkey trial alike. The five-paragraph essay is there for students whenever they need it.

Furthermore, once students have a solid grasp of the five paragraph writing structure, they will be ready to move on to more advanced writing.

2. Structure is the gateway to style – not its gatekeeper.

One of the long-time criticisms of the five-paragraph essay is that it traps students into negating their own creativity; that they will only be able to produce mere skeletons of work, void of any individual flare. This, of course, is not true and is conceived off of the misconception that any structure automatically acts as an impediment to creativity.

The five paragraph essay is not meant to hinder students’ creativity at all: rather, it is intended to guide students towards the proper spots where they can let their creativity shine, i.e. via tone, word choice, conclusions drawn, etc.

In this way, creativity is meant to shine even brighter, as opposed to if it were allowed to flounder about helplessly in a formless frame.

3. It is an extremely effective tool for practicing and perfecting basic grammar.

Due to the nature of the essay’s form, students will simply not have the room to go off on long, rambling tangents, complete with many-a run-on sentences. Thus, students will have to pay special attention to the types of sentences they do end up using: they will most likely end up being a mix of simple and compound sentences, adhering to the basic S-V-O form. Allowing students to not only practice utilizing this basic sentence structure, but in a way that is intended to express their ideas effectively, will help them become true masters of grammar. They will thus not have to think twice about the foundations of grammar in the future, but already have the idea of what makes a sentence “work” wired into their head.

4. It allows for easy and dependable peer communication.

Although individual improvement is a principal aim of many English classes, it is not without the consistent exchange of ideas with others that one can get there. The five-paragraph essay is the perfect remedy for any roadblocks that might come in the way of students sharing their ideas effectively with one another. Students engaging in critical dialogue about their essays will amount to the brief yet hearty exchange of ideas that can make for accessible and engaging classwide discussions. When it comes to written work sparking the wave of dialogue between your students, there is simply nothing more trustworthy than the five-paragraph essay to get them going – it saves time, and therefore lets the ideas go where they please.

5. With a slightly narrowed lens, argumentation skills will be infinitely improved.

The five-paragraph essay is so important because it helps us see what is not. In the real world, when we have a point to make, there is sometimes no end to the reasons why we believe that we’re right. Consequently, we might have moderate trouble in differentiating points of true weight versus mere addendums to our passions. The five-paragraph essay, again, is a remedy for this problem: it acts naturally as a sieve for all the throwaway words and extraneous details that we’re wasting our spirit on. It forces us to be able to not only demonstrate, but understand, that saying something ought not to be a labyrinthine endeavor – three points, when they are solidly launched and grounded, can get us far, indeed.

Take these points into consideration the next time you’re debating whether or not to assign a five-paragraph essay. But remember, just because the five-paragraph essay should be preserved, does not mean that it shouldn’t be amended to meet the unique needs of students along the way. It should likewise be placed on no pedestal – the five-paragraph essay is a great way to start writers off, but by no means is it the stuff that defines their careers.

Essay Writing Unit: How to Teach the Essay

Teach your students how to write an essay! This comprehensive essay writing unit includes both the print and digital teaching resources and lessons for every part of an essay.

First, focus on teaching the thesis statement and introductory paragraph.

The first writing unit includes targeted teaching strategies to teach students how to write a thesis statement and an introduction to an essay. This thesis writing teaching unit includes a teaching presentation (PowerPoint and Google Slide) for direct instruction. This teaching presentation includes differentiation and examples to help students become stronger writers. There is also a PDF and a Google Doc for students to practice their work.

Then, teach students about topic  sentences  and body paragraphs.

The second writing unit helps students learn how to write specific and focused topic sentences and body paragraphs. For the body paragraphs, students will learn how to include and explain examples. This body paragraph and topic sentence teaching unit includes a teaching presentation (PowerPoint and Google Slide) for direct instruction. This teaching presentation includes differentiation and examples to help students become stronger writers. Plus, the examples are color-coded to help students see the various elements of a body paragraph. There is also a PDF and a Google Doc for students to practice their work.

Finally, teach the conclusion.

Teach students how to write a concluding paragraph to their essay. This part of the writing unit also includes direct instruction materials and student practice.

TEACHERS LIKE YOU SAID…

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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Carley L. says, “Fantastic resource! I used it when preparing for provincial testing with Grade 9 students and it really helped them to organize their ideas. I loved allowing them to choose between having a hard copy or digital copy to work off of as well.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Tayler S. says, “This was an amazing and well organized resource to help students write their essays. It breaks down the parts of an essay and it chunks all the information in to smaller sections to help the students put together a full essay. I will definitely use this resource again! Thank you!”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Ivy V. says, “This was a great resource for my students to use while I was away supervising a band field trip. The students who went away also received a copy to work on when they could. It guided the students through each step for writing an essay and helped boost their confidence!”

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Why Write A Five-Paragraph Essay?

September 16, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

There’s a reason that  Bloom’s Taxonomy , a hierarchy of thinking processes, lists “creation” as its most complex category: whether a student is investigating a hypothesis, building a contraption, or  writing an essay , creating something new is a difficult task. A major component of this difficulty is what educators and psychologists call cognitive load, the amount of working memory resources a task demands of the person performing it. In her widely cited article “A Capacity Theory of Writing: Working Memory in Composition,” the educational scholar Deborah McCutchen illustrates the cognitive load of writing: “to compose a text, skilled writers coordinate within working memory planning goals (e.g., plans for content, audience, overall tone, etc.) and product goals (e.g. requirements of grammaticality, plan fulfillment, etc.) while language generation processes retrieve words to express content and organize those words into appropriate text (see Flower and Hayes, 1980, 1981, 1984 McCutchen, 1994).” Understandably, it can be difficult for a writer to attend to all of these processes at once, and if the cognitive load is too high, the writer might not be able to complete the task. One way to lighten this load is to focus on different aspects of the writing process and product at different times; educators have adopted this principle in frameworks like the 6+1 Writing Traits  or  Judith Hochman’s Teaching Basic Writing Skills . Because it offers a consistent structure, one of the major benefits of the five-paragraph essay is that once a writer is familiar with it, using that  framework for planning  frees more of their cognitive load. With their basic organizational scheme already chosen, the writer can attend more fully to other aspects of their work, such as ideas, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation.

In thinking of the rhetorical power of the five-paragraph essay form, rather than the total number of paragraphs, we should consider a different number, a bit of a magical number: three. In his book Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer , Roy Peter Clark  discusses the hidden power of numbers in language. Citing examples such as “Moe, Larry, and Curly. Tinkers to Evers to Chance. A priest, a minister, and a rabbi. Executive, legislative, judicial,” he notes that “In our language and culture, three provides a sense of the whole.” There’s just something about a set of three things that resounds with people. In allowing the writer to use three body paragraphs to set forth three main points, the five-paragraph essay invites the writer to tap into this power. It is worth noting that three is not the only powerful number. For instance, before they learn the five-paragraph essay form, many students learn the four-paragraph essay, which reemerges occasionally in high school. This form allows students to graduate from three-paragraph essays, whose single body paragraph generally explores one major point, to use two body paragraphs to explore a duality within their topic.

The cultural argument for the five-paragraph essay may, at first, seem self-serving: It is useful because it is widely used. But just as it serves a purpose for writers, it serves a purpose for readers. Faced with this familiar form, readers know to look for a guiding claim or thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph. Anticipating how the structure works makes it easier for the reader to comprehend the piece. This is not to say that all five-paragraph essays work the exact same way. As we noted above, the advantage of a familiar structure is to let students concentrate on other aspects of writing, so as students progress, their ideas should grow more sophisticated even within this same form. Their order of body paragraphs should have a perceptible logic, their analyses should be complex, and rather than serving as a simple summary, their conclusion could emphasize the significance of their argument. Even after writers move on to longer and more complex forms, they may still find occasion to access the benefits of the five-paragraph essay. Two of the highest-stakes pieces in high school, the  ACT or SAT  essay and the main  Common Application  statement, lend themselves well to the form. In both the ACT and SAT, testers must compose a complete essay in less than an hour. If they enter the test already tentatively knowing what their structure will be, they will save valuable minutes of writing time. The urgency of time is also a factor for the essays’ audiences. Both the test essays and the Common Application essay are read by people who are consuming a high volume of pieces and consuming them quickly — in the case of the application essay, in  just a few minutes . It is to the writer’s advantage to make the reader’s job easier by giving them a vivid, specific essay in a structure that is easy to follow.

The students who rail against five-paragraph essays might be surprised to hear that the form is controversial in academia as well; in fact, a new book by the college instructor John Warner, titled  Why They Can’t Write , is subtitled  Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities . While we don’t want to kill the five-paragraph essay, we agree that the form has at least one downside: the potential for overuse. If every piece a student composes is a five-paragraph essay, that’s a problem. No single structure, essay or otherwise, should encompass all of a student writer’s experiences in a school year, or even in a single class. Writers of all ages need opportunities to wrestle with form. We don’t want writers to believe, as even some first-year college students do, that big ideas always come in threes, or that one paragraph is always sufficient for sharing their thoughts on one of those ideas. Notably, hardly any pieces of “real world” writing, including published essays, take the form of a five-paragraph essay. That’s another downside: ultimately, the structure is too simple for public discourse. Even as we help students understand and access the benefits of the five-paragraph essay, we must emphasize that the form acts like a set of writerly training wheels. Eventually, with instructors’ guidance, students need to shift from letting form determine their ideas to letting their ideas determine form. At that point, the training wheels should fall away, and writers will zoom forward, perhaps a little wobbly at times, but entirely under their own power.

By  Elizabeth Walters , Private Tutor and Writing Coach

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Essay Writing: The Five-Paragraph Myth

by Nancy Tuten | Apr 28, 2020 | 0 comments

In our educational journey, we likely learned some myths about writing.  One pernicious myth is the bane of many college English professors’ existence: the belief that writers should always employ the five-paragraph essay template—a rigid model compelling the writer to have a single-paragraph introduction containing a thesis, three body paragraphs addressing three distinct points, and a single-paragraph conclusion. John Warner, in his pithy article “ Kill the Five-Paragraph Essay ,” rightly notes that “there may be no greater enemy to quality writing than the five-paragraph essay.”

Here we explain why the five-paragraph essay formula is problematic and argue instead that the number of paragraphs in any document—including the argumentative essay—depends on the content the writer is trying to convey. (Scroll down to the bottom of this article for a video version of this article.)

In an effort to help beginning writers, many teachers encourage the five-paragraph essay template. Starting with a simplistic format is not inherently a bad idea, but often students aren’t told the “rest of the story”: The five-paragraph essay model is certainly  one possible structure for conveying ideas, but it is not the  only  one. Often it is not the best option, and at other times, it  doesn’t work at all.

What about Writing Outside of Academics?

In academic settings, the thesis-driven essay works well for papers and tests that include discussion questions because it enables students to present both the knowledge they have gained and the critical thinking necessary for making sense of that knowledge.

But the essay (five-paragraph or otherwise) is not always the most appropriate model for professional writing outside the academy.  For example, similar to other journalistic writing, blog posts (such as this one) typically include short paragraphs, many of which are only a sentence long. In a world dominated by tweets and Instagram or Snap Chat captions, the fully-developed paragraphs that essays demand are inappropriate.

But while not all professional writing is thesis driven, some of it surely is; reports, proposals, and analyses, for example, benefit from being focused and organized logically into paragraphs that clearly support a central idea.

When the Five-Paragraph Essay Works Fine

If a writer has only three points to make, and if each of those points can be adequately argued or depicted in a single paragraph, then the five-paragraph structure works perfectly.

For example, suppose I want to assert that a gym membership is better than exercising at home. I might have three points to make in defense of that statement:

• First, gyms offer more equipment.
• Second, there are trainers at the gym who can assist me.
• Third, having others around who are also exercising might motivate me.

In this case, because I have three points to make, the five-paragraph essay works fine; the writer can support each of these three points in a separate body paragraph, adding examples and explanations to convince the reader that each point is valid.

Why the Five-Paragraph Essay Usually Doesn’t Work

But what if a writer wishes to make only one or two points—or perhaps four or five or seventeen points?

Or what if one point really needs more than one paragraph to be adequately developed and should be broken down into two or three or more sub -points?

In most writing situations, the five-paragraph essay simply does not work.

Rigid adherence to the five-paragraph essay model often results in an essay that includes one or two weak paragraphs. A writer who has only two strong points to make but believes the essay must have three will end up writing a flimsy, underdeveloped and unconvincing third body paragraph that weakens the entire essay.

What  Is the Appropriate Number of Paragraphs?

The appropriate number of paragraphs in the body of an essay is the number it takes to fulfill the promise made to the reader in the thesis. Writers must adequately address the thesis.

The body of an essay is shaped not by an arbitrary fixed number but by the content .

Instead of trying to force everything you write into a five-paragraph essay model, let content be your guide about how to organize and develop the body of an essay.

Once you have a thesis, first ask yourself what points you need to make in order to convince your reader that the thesis is true. Each of those points will be a “section” of your essay’s body consisting of one or more paragraphs.

Next, ask yourself what details you can include as evidence in support of each of those points.

Finally, ask yourself if any of those points are so complex that they should be broken down into more than one paragraph.

Once you have answered those three questions, you’ll have a rough idea about the appropriate number of paragraphs necessary to adequately address the essay’s thesis.

Writing is Discovery, and Drafting is Recursive

But you won’t know for certain how many paragraphs you’ll need until you actually try to write them.

We say that writing is discovery because the act of writing often helps us figure out what we know and don’t know.

Maybe you will find that one of the points you thought you could make doesn’t work after all. Maybe in the process of writing about one point, you’ll think of another one. Maybe a point you thought could be developed in two paragraphs really needs three or more—or only one.

Drafting is a recursive process: writers must go back and forth, fine-tuning the thesis and the support of that thesis until they work successfully together to produce a unified, coherent piece of writing in which every word contributes meaningfully to the message and in which the organization of paragraphs and sentences flows logically.

Not Every Essay Needs a Separate Conclusion

The five-paragraph myth also assumes that an essay always needs a conclusion paragraph. While we typically do need a separate introductory paragraph, sometimes we don’t really need a separate conclusion.

Consider for example, an essay that traces the development of a character in a story.

The thesis might look something like this:

At the beginning of the story, Jane Doe considers herself superior to most of her fellow townspeople because she is educated and because her family is wealthy, but when her father becomes gravely ill and in need of a kidney transplant to save his life, Jane discovers that neither a college degree nor money determine a person’s goodness and worth.

• The first body paragraph would provide evidence from the story that Jane considers herself superior.
• The second body paragraph would explain how her father’s illness begins to challenge Jane’s personal beliefs.
• The third body paragraph—presenting evidence that Jane has been changed by her experiences—could double as the conclusion if the writer touches on all the previous points and feels that a separate conclusion would simply be repetitive.

Once again, the five-paragraph model—which assumes a separate concluding paragraph—does not always make sense.

The Number of Paragraphs Is Merely One Consideration

Determining the appropriate number of paragraphs is just one step of many required to produce a good essay. Writers must also have a strong thesis and write well-developed paragraphs—two topics discussed in other posts.

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• Unlearning the Five-Paragraph Essay

by Stephanie Truskowski | Feb 28, 2022 | Soscwriter | 0 comments

A student recently came to my office hours with a paper that had overlong paragraphs. When we discussed the unfocused nature of the paragraphs, her rationale for the length of her paragraphs was interesting. She explained that when she received the prompt, she calculated the number of words in the paper based on the page length and then allocated words between three body paragraphs. By her own admission, this process had not been successful because the paragraphs became bloated to reach this self-imposed word count. This example demonstrates the way that the five-paragraph essay is an impediment to effective college writing. The biggest step that a student can take to transition from high school writing to college writing is moving beyond the five-paragraph essay and giving themselves permission to use as many paragraphs as necessary.

The five-paragraph essay as a model is comfortable because it is a staple of high school writing, and the prescriptive nature makes the writing process easier. The model, which is taught as good practice in high school classes, provides students with a formulaic way of writing an essay that has a utilitarian purpose. To plan a five-paragraph essay one must decide on three main points for body paragraphs and fill those ideas with evidence from the text without necessarily unifying these points into one argument. This is fundamentally utilitarian because it streamlines the writing process. For timed test like the AP exams where the goal of writing is to demonstrate knowledge as efficiently as possible, it is helpful to have this kind of rigid model that can be filled with the necessary information. It allows a student to quickly generate an essay that hits on three major points, which fits the purpose of much of high school work.

The issue with this approach at a college level is not that a five-paragraph essay automatically produces poor writing, but rather that the college writing is asking students to move beyond reproducing ideas in a rigid structure. High school writing is not inherently bad, and a student can write very competently within a constrained structure. Many of the principles that one learns through having a limited number of paragraphs, like how to use evidence or how to structure analysis, are vital to producing compelling and well-argued essays. However, the rigid and comfortable structure is effectively the training wheels of writing. It is to develop other skills, but one must eventually grow beyond it. The same student who can write competently within a five-paragraph essay can write even more compellingly once they move beyond it.

Once one moves to write more complex ideas, the five-paragraph essay becomes a hinderance because of its rigidity. There is a key difference between the goals of high school writing and college writing that cannot be fulfilled effectively through a rigid five-paragraph structure. Instead of demonstrating an understanding of the test through three different claims, students are being asked to make a single claim. This means that the paragraphs each serve as steps in a main claim and are connected to each other. Partitioning this claim into three parts and trying to force fit all the argumentative moves into three long paragraphs will kneecap an argument. There are two options for fitting a complex argument into a five-paragraph essay, and both do a disservice to the argument. The first option is to limit the argument to three subpoints, which cuts nuanced points that would aid in making a convincing argument. This approach makes the argument unnecessarily limited. The second option is to include all the points of the argument in three paragraphs loosely organized thematically. While this allows the student to include all of the points of their argument but results in long unfocused paragraphs. Both ways of trying to fit a complex argument into such a rigid structure ultimately weaken the writing. It is a disservice to well thought out arguments for them to be constrained by a set number of body paragraphs.

The biggest step that students can take to improve their writing from a high school level to a college level is to give themselves permission to use as many paragraphs as necessary for their argument. The necessary shift to liberate oneself from the limitations of the five-paragraph essay is to change how one conceives of body paragraphs. Rather than a thematic bucket into which to add subpoints, each body paragraph is a step leading to a central claim. The idea of paragraphs as part of the claim is vital in understanding that the argument dictates the number of paragraphs rather than the other way around. So, to return to the student carefully meting out words between paragraphs, a paragraph can be ended once the point is made if one is not confined to three body paragraphs. Students can always reach out to Writing Advisors in order to discuss how to structure essays and how to write more concise paragraphs. One of the goals of the writing program is to help make the step from high school level writing to college level writing, and Writing Advisors are avaliable to help students plan and execute their writing in ways that break from high school models like the five-paragraph essay. Taking the step of liberating oneself from the five-paragraph model is important not just for the sake of writing SOSC essays, but as a part of learning to write at a higher level. As the essays they are asked to write get longer, having the skill of making focused points will be invaluable.

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Should You Teach the Five-Paragraph Essay?

People have strong feelings about the five-paragraph essay. For the past several decades, educators have debated the benefits and consequences of teaching the five-paragraph essay. Apparently, it’s not just educators who have opinions about the five-paragraph essay. I recently came across these comments on another website:

In High School, I was “taught” to write five-paragraph essays (and when I say “taught,” I mean “forced.”) The five-paragraph essay was the only form allowed in Sophomore English class.

…my daughter hated it. She would have crying fits each and every time.

I understand when people get emotional over controversial topics—global warming, budget cuts, tax increases—but I was not aware that the five-paragraph essay fell into this category. What exactly is going on here? Let’s find out!

A Personal Five-Paragraph Essay Story

When taking the CBEST test to become a teacher, an experienced middle school science teacher told me, “Just write a five-paragraph essay. Don’t write about anything you care about. Just write an introduction, three paragraphs, and a conclusion—that’s it. Nothing more! You’ll be guaranteed to receive a passing grade.”

I thought that was strange advice, as I had never worried about getting a passing grade on a writing assignment. Looking back, I can only assume that this science teacher had worried.

Did I take the science teacher’s advice? No. But half way into the essay section of the test, those words of advice echoed in my mind, while I sat in frustration. I was lost. I hadn’t planned properly, and I was in over my head. I began to wonder, “What’s my point? Where am I headed? How am I going to finish this? What am I trying to say?”

Well, I got out of that jam, and I’m happy to say I received a high score. That being said, the science teacher’s five-paragraph essay advice stuck in my mind long after the CBEST test was over, and even influenced how I taught writing once I became a teacher. I realized that I had always been a naturally proficient writer, but I didn’t fully understand what I did. Is that what I wanted for my future students?

What I learned from that experience was that students, and all writers, need specific writing skills to fall back on, and by writing skills, I don’t mean just grammar. Real power and real confidence in writing comes from knowing what one is doing and knowing how one is doing it—and not just by being able to do it.

What is a Five Paragraph Essay?

Looking for the most generic definition of a five-paragraph essay I could find, I went to Wikipedia. Wikipedia describes the five-paragraph essay as this:

The five-paragraph essay is a form of written argument. It is a common requisite in assignments in middle school, high school, and university and sometimes elementary school. The format requires an essay to have five paragraphs: one introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs with support and development, and one concluding paragraph. Because of this structure, it is also known as a hamburger essay or a three tier essay… The five-paragraph essay format is also applied to speech making, with some college classes teaching the five-paragraph format, along with an organized system of outlining and pre-writing the speech.

Should You Be For or Against the Five Paragraph Essay?

After reading that definition above, do you think people should be upset over the five-paragraph essay? But before you answer that question, please ask yourself these four questions:

1.   Are you against paragraph form? 2.   Are you against beginnings, middles and endings? 3.   Are you against introductions, bodies, and conclusions? 4.   Are you in favor of rambling and pointless essays?

Put simply, the five-paragraph essay should not be viewed as an end—because in reality—it is a means to an end. Teaching the five-paragraph essay teaches young students a variety of important skills. And I say young students, because if student master these skills when they are young, they won’t be an issue when they are old.  Here are a few facts:

1.   Students must write in paragraph form. 2.   Students must have a beginning, middle and ending. 3.   A beginning, middle and ending is essentially the same thing as an introduction, body, and conclusion. 4.   Students must understand that they cannot ramble. Students must be headed in a purposeful direction in their writing—and they must get there.

The five-paragraph essay is the easiest, fastest, and best way to teach all this. It teaches good thinking.

A Foundational Essay for Beginning Writers

The five-paragraph essay is a foundational essay. It’s an essay to be built upon. But a variety of questions remain:

1.   When should the five-paragraph essay be taught? 2.   How long or how often should students write in five-paragraph essay format? 3.   In what way should the five-paragraph essay be taught?

The five-paragraph essay is an essay for beginners. All students past a certain age should be able to write a five-paragraph essay quickly and easily. What is that certain age? Personally, I think the five-paragraph essay should be mastered in elementary school , but only because it CAN be mastered in elementary school. It definitely should not be an issue in high school for any student. Even struggling writers should be able to master the five-paragraph essay before leaving middle school.

I’ve mostly taught beginning writers and struggling writers, and I don’t teach a strict five-paragraph formula. However, I do work with five-paragraphs quite often because five paragraphs just happen to be the very best length to work with. Five paragraphs is the length that best helps students to develop the rhythm of beginning, middle, and ending in paragraphs, along with having a beginning, middle, and ending in the whole composition (two levels of beginning, middle, and ending).

I use the A, B, C Sentence ™ and the Secret A, B, C Sentence ™ to achieve this. It’s the fastest, most effective way to achieve this! It is also the most flexible and natural way to achieve this. Be sure to check out the Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay writing curriculum on the homepage. Personally, I don’t think teaching writing should ever be static or dogmatic. For me, teaching the five-paragraph essay is mostly about teaching fantastic paragraph form and logical construction.

Please note, other paragraph lengths are also of value. For instance, four paragraphs is the best length for teaching beginning writers and struggling writers the two-sided thought patterns: cause-effect, compare-contrast, pro-con etc. Always remember, five is just number, and so is four. Different numbers serve different purposes.

A Foundational Essay for Older Writers

Even though the five-paragraph essay is an essay for beginners, it is fine if there is still a strong emphasis put on it in high school and in college. But in high school and in college, it should be the equivalent of knowing one’s multiplication tables. The five-paragraph should be used as a tool that helps students access a variety of different types of essays and a variety of the different organizational patterns found in writing. Put simply, the five-paragraph essay is a tool. It is not an end in itself.

The greatest benefit that comes from being able to write the five-paragraph essay is the awareness of five-paragraph essay thinking. Five-paragraph essay thinking provides value for a lifetime. The same thinking that creates five-paragraph essays can be used to write four paragraphs, seven paragraphs, or fifteen paragraphs.

A word of warning: If teachers will only accept five paragraphs, nothing more or less, always and forever, their students will eventually feel as the people at the top of this page felt. I do not recommend this. The five-paragraph essay is a teaching tool, not an end result.

Revisiting the Science Teacher Who Writes Five-Paragraph Essays

I recently spoke with the science teacher who advised me to write the five-paragraph essay on the CBEST test so many years before. I asked him if he was still such a rabid fan of the five-paragraph essay. He was. He told me he uses it all the time to make the points he wants to make. With social media, everyone is an author. The science teacher posts comments on important issues, and also participates in several forums for several of his hobbies. He enjoys helping others and debating.

He explained that he is not particularly interested in writing, but that he has opinions and enjoys making points.  The five-paragraph essay lets him do that quickly and effortlessly. The science teacher says that the five-paragraph essay was not drilled into him, and that he only really discovered its benefits in college. It’s then that he became a fan.

The science teacher showed me a number of his posts, and they would not have jumped out at me as being five-paragraph essays. In fact, he wrote posts that were four, six, and eight paragraphs also. Apparently, the teacher likes five-paragraph thinking as much as he likes the five-paragraph essay. In short, he just likes to make points and provide proof that his points are valid. He considers the five-paragraph essay to be the backbone of his writing. He says that people take his comments and opinions seriously, and that he is even a trusted authority in some places he posts. It seems that his readers focus on the points he makes and not the fact that he is using five-paragraph thinking.

A Final Note

The first step in making a person love to write is to make the person a competent writer. That opens the door and the mind to more possibilities. As teachers our job is not just to teach the students who love to write, but also to teach the students who are afraid to write or who don’t like to write.

The five-paragraph essay is a teaching tool. Most criticism of the five-paragraph essay comes down to its overuse, along with a dogmatic approach to using it in the classroom. Personally, I agree with much of that criticism. The five-paragraph essay is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

The fastest, most effective way to teach clear, organized paragraph and multi-paragraph writing… Guaranteed!

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Is the Five-Paragraph Essay History?

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Has the five-paragraph essay, long a staple in school writing curricula, outlived its usefulness?

The venerable writing tool has largely fallen out of favor among influential English/language arts researchers and professional associations. “Rigid” and “constraining” are the two words critics often use to describe the format.

There’s no denying that a five-paragraph essay—comprising an introduction with a thesis, three paragraphs each with a topic sentence and supporting details, and a conclusion—is highly structured, even artificial, in format. Yet many teachers still rely on it at least to some degree. Supporters of the method argue that, used judiciously, it can be a helpful step on the road to better writing for emerging writers.

“You can’t break the rules until you know the rules. That’s why for me, we definitely teach it and we teach it pretty strongly,” said Mark Anderson, a teacher at the Jonas Bronck Academy in New York City, who recently helped devise a framework for grading student writing based on the five-paragraph form.

Classical Origins

Long before “graphic organizers” and other writing tools entered teachers’ toolkits, students whittled away at five-paragraph essays.

Just where the form originated seems to be something of a mystery, with some scholars pointing to origins as far back as classical rhetoric. Today, the debate about the form is intertwined with broader arguments about literacy instruction: Should it be based on a formally taught set of skills and strategies? Should it be based on a somewhat looser approach, as in free-writing “workshop” models, which are sometimes oriented around student choice of topics and less around matters of grammar and form?

Surprisingly, not much research on writing instruction compares the five-paragraph essay with other tools for teaching writing, said Steve Graham, a professor of educational leadership and innovation at Arizona State University, who has studied writing instruction for more than 30 years.

Instead, meta-analyses seem to point out general features of effective writing instruction. Among other things, they include supportive classroom environments in which students can work together as they learn how to draft, revise, and edit their work; some specific teaching of skills, such as learning to combine sentences; and finally, connecting reading and content acquisition to writing, he said.

As a result, the five-paragraph essay remains a point of passionate debate.

A quick Google search turns up hundreds of articles, both academic and personal, pro and con, with titles like “If You Teach or Write the 5-Paragraph Essay—Stop It!” duking it out with “In Defense of the Five-Paragraph Essay.”

Structure or Straitjacket?

One basic reason why the form lives on is that writing instruction does not appear to be widely or systematically taught in teacher-preparation programs, Graham said, citing surveys of writing teachers he’s conducted.

“It’s used a lot because it provides a structure teachers are familiar with,” he said. “They were introduced to it as students and they didn’t get a lot of preparation on how to teach writing.”

The advent of standardized accountability assessments also seems to have contributed, as teachers sought ways of helping students respond to time-limited prompts, said Catherine Snow, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“It simplified the tasks in the classroom and it gives you structures across students that are comparable and gradable, because you have real expectations for structure,” she said.

It’s not clear whether the Common Core State Standards’ new emphases in writing expectations have impacted the five-paragraph essay’s popularity one way or another.

“I don’t connect the two in my mind,” Anderson said. “There is more informational writing and analytical writing, but I haven’t got a sense that the five paragraph format is necessarily the best way to teach it.”

Still, Anderson argues that structure matters a great deal when teaching writing, and the five-paragraph essay has that in spades.

At a prior school, Anderson found that a more free-form workshop model in use tended to fall short for students with disabilities and those who came without a strong foundation in spelling and grammar. The format of a five-paragraph essay provided them with useful scaffolds.

“The structure guides them to organizing their ideas in a way that is very clear, and even if they’re very much at a literal level, they’re at least clearly stating what their ideas are,” he said. “Yes, it is very formulaic. But that’s not to say you can’t have a really good question, with really rich text, and engage students in that question.”

On the other hand, scholars who harbor reservations about the five-paragraph essay argue that it can quickly morph from support to straitjacket. The five-paragraph essay lends itself to persuasive or argumentative writing, but many other types of writing aren’t well served by it, Snow pointed out. You would not use a five-paragraph essay to structure a book review or a work memorandum.

“To teach it extensively I think undermines the whole point of writing,” she said. “You write to communicate something, and that means you have to adapt the form to the function.”

A Balanced Approach

Melissa Mazzaferro, a middle school writing teacher in East Hartford, Conn., tries to draw from the potential strengths of the five-paragraph essay when she teaches writing, without adhering slavishly to it.

A former high school teacher, Mazzaferro heard a lot of complaints from her peers about the weak writing skills of entering high school students and ultimately moved to middle school to look into the problem herself.

Her take on the debate: It’s worth walking students through some of the classic five-paragraph-essay strategies—compare and contrast, cause and effect—but not worth insisting that students limit themselves to three points, if they can extend an idea through multiple scenarios.

“Middle school especially is where they start to learn those building blocks: how you come up with a controlling idea for a writing piece and how you support it with details and examples,” she said. “You want to draw your reader in, to have supportive details, whether it’s five paragraphs or 20. That is where it’s a great starting point.”

But, she adds, it shouldn’t be an ending point. By the time students enter 9th grade, Mazzaferro says that students should be developing more sophisticated arguments.

“I used to help a lot of kids write their college essays, and whenever I saw a five-paragraph essay, I’d make them throw it out and start over,” she said. “At that point, you should be able to break the rules.”

Coverage of the implementation of college- and career-ready standards and the use of personalized learning is supported in part by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.

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The Ultimate Guide to the 5-Paragraph Essay

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• M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
• B.A., History, Armstrong State University

A five-paragraph essay is a prose composition that follows a prescribed format of an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph, and is typically taught during primary English education and applied on standardized testing throughout schooling.

Learning to write a high-quality five-paragraph essay is an essential skill for students in early English classes as it allows them to express certain ideas, claims, or concepts in an organized manner, complete with evidence that supports each of these notions. Later, though, students may decide to stray from the standard five-paragraph format and venture into writing an  exploratory essay  instead.

Still, teaching students to organize essays into the five-paragraph format is an easy way to introduce them to writing literary criticism, which will be tested time and again throughout their primary, secondary, and further education.

Writing a Good Introduction

The introduction is the first paragraph in your essay, and it should accomplish a few specific goals: capture the reader's interest, introduce the topic, and make a claim or express an opinion in a thesis statement.

It's a good idea to start your essay with a hook (fascinating statement) to pique the reader's interest, though this can also be accomplished by using descriptive words, an anecdote, an intriguing question, or an interesting fact. Students can practice with creative writing prompts to get some ideas for interesting ways to start an essay.

The next few sentences should explain your first statement, and prepare the reader for your thesis statement, which is typically the last sentence in the introduction. Your  thesis sentence  should provide your specific assertion and convey a clear point of view, which is typically divided into three distinct arguments that support this assertation, which will each serve as central themes for the body paragraphs.

Writing Body Paragraphs

The body of the essay will include three body paragraphs in a five-paragraph essay format, each limited to one main idea that supports your thesis.

To correctly write each of these three body paragraphs, you should state your supporting idea, your topic sentence, then back it up with two or three sentences of evidence. Use examples that validate the claim before concluding the paragraph and using transition words to lead to the paragraph that follows — meaning that all of your body paragraphs should follow the pattern of "statement, supporting ideas, transition statement."

Words to use as you transition from one paragraph to another include: moreover, in fact, on the whole, furthermore, as a result, simply put, for this reason, similarly, likewise, it follows that, naturally, by comparison, surely, and yet.

Writing a Conclusion

The final paragraph will summarize your main points and re-assert your main claim (from your thesis sentence). It should point out your main points, but should not repeat specific examples, and should, as always, leave a lasting impression on the reader.

The first sentence of the conclusion, therefore, should be used to restate the supporting claims argued in the body paragraphs as they relate to the thesis statement, then the next few sentences should be used to explain how the essay's main points can lead outward, perhaps to further thought on the topic. Ending the conclusion with a question, anecdote, or final pondering is a great way to leave a lasting impact.

Once you complete the first draft of your essay, it's a good idea to re-visit the thesis statement in your first paragraph. Read your essay to see if it flows well, and you might find that the supporting paragraphs are strong, but they don't address the exact focus of your thesis. Simply re-write your thesis sentence to fit your body and summary more exactly, and adjust the conclusion to wrap it all up nicely.

Practice Writing a Five-Paragraph Essay

Students can use the following steps to write a standard essay on any given topic. First, choose a topic, or ask your students to choose their topic, then allow them to form a basic five-paragraph by following these steps:

• Decide on your  basic thesis , your idea of a topic to discuss.
• Decide on three pieces of supporting evidence you will use to prove your thesis.
• Write an introductory paragraph, including your thesis and evidence (in order of strength).
• Write your first body paragraph, starting with restating your thesis and focusing on your first piece of supporting evidence.
• End your first paragraph with a transitional sentence that leads to the next body paragraph.
• Write paragraph two of the body focussing on your second piece of evidence. Once again make the connection between your thesis and this piece of evidence.
• End your second paragraph with a transitional sentence that leads to paragraph number three.
• Repeat step 6 using your third piece of evidence.
• Begin your concluding paragraph by restating your thesis. Include the three points you've used to prove your thesis.
• End with a punch, a question, an anecdote, or an entertaining thought that will stay with the reader.

Once a student can master these 10 simple steps, writing a basic five-paragraph essay will be a piece of cake, so long as the student does so correctly and includes enough supporting information in each paragraph that all relate to the same centralized main idea, the thesis of the essay.

Limitations of the Five-Paragraph Essay

The five-paragraph essay is merely a starting point for students hoping to express their ideas in academic writing; there are some other forms and styles of writing that students should use to express their vocabulary in the written form.

According to Tory Young's "Studying English Literature: A Practical Guide":

"Although school students in the U.S. are examined on their ability to write a  five-paragraph essay , its  raison d'être  is purportedly to give practice in basic writing skills that will lead to future success in more varied forms. Detractors feel, however, that writing to rule in this way is more likely to discourage imaginative writing and thinking than enable it. . . . The five-paragraph essay is less aware of its  audience  and sets out only to present information, an account or a kind of story rather than explicitly to persuade the reader."

Students should instead be asked to write other forms, such as journal entries, blog posts, reviews of goods or services, multi-paragraph research papers, and freeform expository writing around a central theme. Although five-paragraph essays are the golden rule when writing for standardized tests, experimentation with expression should be encouraged throughout primary schooling to bolster students' abilities to utilize the English language fully.

• Practice in Making a Simple Outline for a Cause & Effect Paragraph
• Write an Attention-Grabbing Opening Sentence for an Essay
• An Essay Revision Checklist
• Examples of Great Introductory Paragraphs
• Make Your Paragraphs Flow to Improve Writing
• How to Write a Narrative Essay or Speech (With Topic Ideas)
• What Is Expository Writing?
• Practice in Supporting a Topic Sentence with Specific Details
• Tips on How to Write an Argumentative Essay
• 100 Persuasive Essay Topics
• Writing an Opinion Essay
• How to Write a Good Thesis Statement
• 501 Topic Suggestions for Writing Essays and Speeches
• Venn Diagrams to Plan Essays and More
• Write a Compare and Contrast Essay
• Writing a Descriptive Essay

• Career Center

My Anti-Five-Paragraph-Essay Five-Paragraph Essay

NCTE 09.10.16 Teaching Writing

This post is written by NCTE member Kim Zarins. 

As a high-school survivor of this form and now a teacher occasionally receiving it from students trying their best, I have to say I hate this abomination. I hate it so much, I decided to be naughty and condemn the five-paragraph essay in a five-paragraph essay. Here you go. Enjoy. Or not.]

From the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of the modern high school, the five-paragraph essay has been utilized in high school classrooms. Despite this long tradition, the five-paragraph essay is fatally flawed. It cheapens a student’s thesis, essay flow and structure, and voice.

First, the five-paragraph essay constricts an argument beyond usefulness or interest. In principle it reminds one of a three-partitioned dinner plate. The primary virtue of such dinner plates is that they are conveniently discarded after only one use, much like the essays themselves. The secondary virtue is to keep different foods from touching each other, like the three-body paragraphs. However, when eating from a partitioned plate, a diner might have a bite of burger, then a spoonful of baked beans, then back to the burger, and then the macaroni salad. The palate satisfies its complex needs for texture, taste, choice, and proportion. Not so for the consumers of the five-paragraph essay, who must move through Point 1, then Point 2, and then Point 3. No exceptions. It is arbitrary force-feeding to the point of indigestion. After the body paragraphs, and if readers have not already expired, they may read the Conclusion, which is actually a summary of the Introduction. There is no sense of building one’s argument or of proportion.

Second, critical thinking skills and the organization of the essay’s flow are impaired when a form must be plugged and filled with rows of stunted seeds that will never germinate. If we return to the partitioned-plate analogy, foods are separated, but in food, there is a play in blending flavors, pairing them so that the sum is greater than the individual parts. Also, there is typically dessert. Most people like dessert and anticipate it eagerly. In the five-paragraph essay there is no anticipation, only homogeneity, tedium, and death. Each bite is not food for thought but another dose of the same. It is like Miss Trunchbull in the Roald Dahl novel ,  forcing the little boy to eat chocolate cake until he bursts—with the exception that no one on this planet would mistake the five-paragraph essay for chocolate cake. I only reference the scene’s reluctant, miserable consumption past all joy or desire.

Third, the five-paragraph form flattens a writer’s voice more than a bully’s fist flattens an otherwise perky, loveable face. Even the most gifted writer cannot sound witty in a five-paragraph essay, which makes one wonder why experts assign novice writers this task. High school students suffer to learn this form, only to be sternly reprimanded by college professors who insist that writers actually say something. Confidence is shattered, and students can’t articulate a position, having only the training of the five-paragraph essay dulling their critical reasoning skills. Moreover, unlike Midas whose touch turns everything to gold, everything the five-paragraph essay touches turns to lead. A five-paragraph essay is like a string of beads with no differentiation, such as a factory, rather than an individual, might produce.  No matter how wondrous the material, the writer of a five-paragraph essay will sound reductive, dry, and unimaginative. Reading over their own work, these writers will wonder why they ever bothered with the written word to begin with, when they sound so inhuman. A human’s voice is not slotted into bins of seven to eleven sentences apiece. A human voice meanders—but meaning guides the meandering. Voice leans and wends and backtracks. It does not scoop blobs of foodstuff in endless rows. If Oliver Twist were confronted with such blobs of written porridge, he would not ask for more.

In conclusion, the five-paragraph essay is an effective way to remove all color and joy from this earth. It would be better to eat a flavorless dinner from a partitioned plate than to read or write a five-paragraph essay. It would be better to cut one’s toenails, because at least the repetitive task of clipping toenails results in feet more comfortably suited to sneakers, allowing for greater movement in this world. The five-paragraph essay, by contrast, cuts all mirth and merit and motion from ideas until there is nothing to stand upon at all, leaving reader and writer alike flat on their faces. Such an essay form is the very three-partitioned tombstone of human reason and imagination.

Kim Zarins is a medievalist and an Associate Professor of English at the California State University at Sacramento. Her debut young adult novel, Sometimes We Tell the Truth , retells Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with modern American teens traveling to Washington D.C. Find her on Twitter @KimZarins.

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Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities There seems to be widespread agreement that?when it comes to the writing skills of college students?we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can’t Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn’t caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we’re teaching writing wrong. Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn’t prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules?such as the five-paragraph essay?designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments. In Why They Can’t Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers. There are no customer reviews for this item yet. Classic Totes Tote bags and pouches in a variety of styles, sizes, and designs , plus mugs, bookmarks, and more! Shipping & Pickup We ship anywhere in the U.S. and orders of $75+ ship free via media mail! Noteworthy Signed Books: Join the Club! Join our Signed First Edition Club (or give a gift subscription) for a signed book of great literary merit, delivered to you monthly. Harvard Square's Independent Bookstore © 2024 Harvard Book Store All rights reserved Contact Harvard Book Store 1256 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel (617) 661-1515 Toll Free (800) 542-READ Email [email protected] View our current hours » Join our bookselling team » We plan to remain closed to the public for two weeks, through Saturday, March 28 While our doors are closed, we plan to staff our phones, email, and harvard.com web order services from 10am to 6pm daily. Store Hours Monday - Saturday: 9am - 11pm Sunday: 10am - 10pm Holiday Hours 12/24: 9am - 7pm 12/25: closed 12/31: 9am - 9pm 1/1: 12pm - 11pm All other hours as usual. Map Find Harvard Book Store » Online Customer Service Shipping » Online Returns » Privacy Policy » Harvard University harvard.edu » Clubs & Services U.S. Locations UMGC Europe Learn Online Find Answers 855-655-8682 Current Students UMGC Effective Writing Center Secrets of the Five-Paragraph Essay Explore more of umgc. Writing Resources This form of writing goes by different names. Maybe you've heard some of them before: "The Basic Essay," "The Academic Response Essay," "The 1-3-1 Essay." Regardless of what you've heard, the name you should remember is "The Easy Essay." Once you are shown how this works--and it only takes a few minutes--you will have in your hands the secret to writing well on almost any academic assignment. Here is how it goes. Secret #1—The Magic of Three Three has always been a magic number for humans, from fairy tales like "The Three Little Pigs" to sayings like “third time’s a charm.” Three seems to be an ideal number for us--including the academic essay. So whenever you are given a topic to write about, a good place to begin is with a list of three. Here are some examples (three of them, of course): Topic : What are the essential characteristics of a good parent? Think in threes and you might come up with: unconditional love  Certainly, there are more characteristics of good parents you could name, but for our essay, we will work in threes. Here's a topic that deals with a controversial issue: Topic : Should women in the military be given frontline combat duties? The first reason that women should be assigned to combat is equality.  The second reason is their great teamwork.  The third reason is their courage. As you see, regardless of the topic, we can list three points about it. And if you wonder about the repetition of words and structure when stating the three points, in this case, repetition is a good thing. Words that seem redundant when close together in an outline will be separated by the actual paragraphs of your essay. So in the essay instead of seeming redundant they will be welcome as signals to the reader of your essay’s main parts. Finally, when the topic is an academic one, your first goal is the same: create a list of three. Topic: Why do so many students fail to complete their college degree? First, students often... Second, many students cannot... Finally, students find that... Regardless of the reasons you might come up with to finish these sentences, the formula is still the same. Secret #2: The Thesis Formula Now with your list of three, you can write the sentence that every essay must have—the thesis, sometimes called the "controlling idea," "overall point," or "position statement." In other words, it is the main idea of the essay that you will try to support, illustrate, or corroborate. Here’s a simple formula for a thesis: The topic + your position on the topic = your thesis. Let’s apply this formula to one of our examples: Topic: Essential characteristics of a good parent Your Position: patience, respect, love Thesis: The essential characteristics of a good parent are patience, respect, and love. As you see, all we did was combine the topic with our position/opinion on it into a single sentence to produce the thesis: The essential characteristics of a good parent are patience, respect, and love. In this case, we chose to list three main points as part of our thesis. Sometimes that’s a good strategy. However, you can summarize them if you wish, as in this example: Topic: Women in combat duty in the military Your Position: They deserve it Thesis: Women deserve to be assigned combat duty in the military. This type of thesis is shorter and easier to write because it provides the overall position or opinion without forcing you to list the support for it in the thesis, which can get awkward and take away from your strong position statement. The three reasons women deserve to be assigned combat duties--equality, teamwork, courage--will be the subjects of your three body paragraphs and do not need to be mentioned until the body paragraph in which they appear. Secret #3: The 1-3-1 Outline With your thesis and list of three main points, you can quickly draw a basic outline of the paragraphs of your essay. You’ll then see why this is often called the 1-3-1 essay. Supporting Evidence for Claim 1     Supporting Evidence for Claim 2 Supporting Evidence for Claim 3 The five-paragraph essay consists of one introduction paragraph (with the thesis at its end), three body paragraphs (each beginning with one of three main points) and one last paragraph—the conclusion. 1-3-1. Once you have this outline, you have the basic template for most academic writing. Most of all, you have an organized way to approach virtually any topic you are assigned. Our helpful admissions advisors can help you choose an academic program to fit your career goals, estimate your transfer credits, and develop a plan for your education costs that fits your budget. If you’re a current UMGC student, please visit the Help Center . 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Sometimes it is rote, formulaic, and poorly applied. Despite that, in my freshman composition courses, I teach the five-paragraph essay because my students don’t know how to write an essay at all. Am I doing the wrong thing? Community College Spotlight had a post that brought this question up for me again. I particularly liked the response the author had to the article “Why Can’t Tiffany Write?” When I was in high school, we did nothing but expository writing for four years. Our model was the 3-3-3 paragraph: One thesis sentence with a subject and an attitude supported by three topic sentences, each with a subject and attitude and each supported by three subtopic sentences, each with a subject and attitude and each supported by three “concrete and specific” details. It drove us nuts, but we learned to support our assertions. College writing was a snap. I really like that idea. Even though it is even more formulaic. I think it could work for my students. One thought on “Is the 5-paragraph essay always bad?” I tried to leave a comment in the linked blog, but it wouldn’t let me. As a 9-12 teacher, I use the 5 paragraph essay with my lower grades and lower level students. It provides structure to their thinking, especially when they lack the experience to express themselves on literary topics. With upper level grades or advanced students, we really focus on tight theses and support, not so much on format. I think the reason that this is an issue with colleges is systemic to both the k-12 system and college system. While it is true that public schools often don’t push students to develop critical thinking skills, and therefore produce poor writers, it is also true that colleges are being run more and more as businesses, and accepting students of lower caliber. I don’t believe that there has ever been a time in history where a society has attempted to educate, at such a high level, it’s entire populace. So, we have a systemic ‘problem’ that emerges as poorly literate college students, when really they’re highly literate elementary ones. Our district is really undergoing growing pains as we develop a comprehensive k-12 literacy program. As a 13 year veteran, I’m basically relearning my craft. I don’t think it’s that high schools are necessarily producing less literate students, it’s just that more are choosing to go to college than ever before, and current research in literacy is exposing a gap that we’ve had for quite some time. Leave a Reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Notify me of followup comments via e-mail Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Get the Reddit app Discussions about the writing craft. The evils of the Five Paragraph Essay By continuing, you agree to our User Agreement and acknowledge that you understand the Privacy Policy . Enter the 6-digit code from your authenticator app You’ve set up two-factor authentication for this account. Enter a 6-digit backup code Create your username and password. Reddit is anonymous, so your username is what you’ll go by here. Choose wisely—because once you get a name, you can’t change it. Reset your password Enter your email address or username and we’ll send you a link to reset your password Check your inbox An email with a link to reset your password was sent to the email address associated with your account Choose a Reddit account to continue Unlearning the Five Paragraph Essay A key challenge for our freshmen students in the transition from high school to college is to unlearn the five paragraph essay. I call the five paragraph essay a hot house flower because it cannot blossom in the sun. No professional writers actually use this form. College instructors may be baffled when they witness it. Yet it is the main form that our freshmen students know and deploy. Unlearning the five paragraph essay may be a greater challenge for our students than learning how to write—with all its messiness—in the first place. As anyone who has tried to master a second language knows, the first language creates interference. We fall back on the inherited patterns of the first language which impede our mastery of the second. What is the five paragraph essay? The five paragraph essay encourages its practitioners to produce a thesis with three parts and then to map those three parts onto body paragraphs followed by a conclusion. The five paragraph essay gives the writer the false comfort of a formula into which to plug ideas. It takes the sting out of thinking—which is one of the primary challenges of writing—and promises us whatever our thoughts, we can reduce them to an over-simplified format. I have witnessed some student writers attempting to produce six page papers with five horribly bloated paragraphs. It’s like religiously following Siri-narrated map directions into an adjacent lake. As long as you are not a stickler for nomenclature, some longer essays are also five paragraph essays when they hew to its peculiar logic of listing and mapping. Not all essays with five paragraphs are five paragraph essays when they grow organically—based on a writer’s purposes and design—rather than being held hostage to a formula. Why is the five paragraph essay a weak form? It distorts what a thesis is. This distortion is both conceptual and syntactic. A thesis presents an arguable idea and also serves as the controlling generalization for the essay as a whole. One way of conceptualizing a thesis is to use the metaphor of an umbrella (this metaphor comes from an  article   written by my colleague Karen Gocsik). A thesis is like an umbrella because it is large enough to cover the full range of ideas explored in body paragraphs. When a thesis is distorted by being broken down into the three parts which are then mapped onto the body paragraphs, it serves as three little umbrellas rather than one large one. Student writers aren’t learning to generalize, but to find a poor substitute for generalizing. The three little umbrellas aren't keeping them from getting soaked. In its crudest form, the three part thesis often devolves into identifying subjects rather than arguments and identifies the areas of focus picked up by the body paragraphs. For example, a student writer might decide to address the issue of friendship in literature, history, and personal experience. Such a tentative thesis focuses on a subject (“friendship”) and three major areas where the writer hopes to address that subject. The writer never identifies the claim about friendship to be developed in the essay, nor even wonders whether it is useful to address these claims in such disparate areas as literature, history, and personal experience. Rather, he or she just joins or adds these three disparate areas together as though they formed an automatically meaningful sequence. Finally, when a thesis is divided into three parts, the sentence which reports these three parts itself frequently breaks down. It is difficult enough to express an idea in a complete sentence. Try encapsulating three ideas, joining them together, and jamming them into the thesis. Chaos generally ensues. It distorts the organization of an essay. The sole organizing principle of the five paragraph essay is that of addition. A well organized essay is more than the sum of its parts. Consider the various components that might be included in an essay. A writer might want to highlight major ideas or issues and minor ones as well. A writer may want to anticipate and address the arguments of others that run counter to his or her own. A writer might wish to explain the complicated reasons behind any given phenomenon (mass incarceration, global warming, income disparity) and identify which ones are most compelling and why. In order to perform the first task one might organize according to a relationship of emphasis: most important, less important, less important still. In order to perform the second task, one might compare and contrast the various arguments. In order to perform the third task, one might devote a paragraph to defining the phenomenon and the next to identifying and assessing its causes. Because it is too rigid in its over-reliance on addition, the five paragraph essay would not allow a writer to organize via emphasis, contrast, or causality. Rather the ideas would have to be presented illogically (as additions) when they should be organized according to other types of relationships which would reflect the real purpose for writing. The form itself encourages incoherence. The five paragraph essay takes meaning making out of the writer’s hands. An essay is a vehicle for exploring ideas and creating meaning. In order to explore ideas, a writer makes a series of decisions about how to present, develop, and organize them. In order to create meaning, a writer decides how to sequence sentence after sentence and paragraph after paragraph. The five paragraph essay takes many of these decisions away from the writer. It promises that a formula will replace decision and meaning making. As long as a writer plugs into the formula, the reader will be electrified by the magical results. As a consequence, students do not develop strategies for the complex expression of their own ideas. How do I best express them? Why should I organize in one way rather than another? How do I anticipate a reader's response to my argument? It creates the illusion that the form creates meaning instead of the writer. It creates the illusion that it is the sole or primary form so that student writers never learn the full variety of formal approaches. The five paragraph essay may have been developed out of a well-meaning effort to simplify essay writing for novice writers.But it is not merely a simplification of essay writing, it is an over-simplification.  And as such, it limits the development of the cognitive abilities of student writers. The five paragraph essay does not encourage students to develop the ability to be critical about their own strengths and weaknesses as writers because it turns writing into a check-list of features that are either present or absent. Why should college instructors pay attention to what students have learned in the past? Teaching students about writing requires an understanding and acknowledgment about their earlier instruction in the five paragraph essay. Without understanding the nature of and the reasoning for that past instruction, you will appear to undermine that instruction without a real purpose. Students won't understand why they are being asked to adapt to a new, unusual, and even strange mode of writing instruction. They will fall into the familiar and comfortable formulas taught to them in the past because you won't have given them reasons for the new instruction about writing and the challenges you put in their path. You might not even know that your instruction in writing is new to your students. In that regard, you and your students may be on a common ground: what is familiar to each of you may not be familiar to the other. But that common ground is not fertile ground for teaching or learning. Unlearning the five paragraph essay means unteaching it as well. 375 IMAGES Why is the Five-Paragraph Essay Harmful by Tiffany Johnson Five Paragraph Essay Chart by Teach Simple The Five-Paragraph Essay Five Paragraph Essay Sample The Structure Of A Five Paragraph Essay The Five Paragraph Essay VIDEO The Five Paragraph Essay A Brief Description Part 1 The Five-Paragraph Essay_DSS Captioned E4 U3 3 3 FIVE PARAGRAPH ESSAY 3 REASONS WHY PEOPLE FAIL ENGLISH ESSAY Part 4 0f 4 the conclusion 5-paragraph essay, phase 1 COMMENTS Live With Julie Green Prophetic Word Aug 20, 2024 LIVE WITH JULIE GREEN PROPHETIC WORD AUG 20, 2024 #juliegreen #propheticword 'She bullies and berates': University of Florida faculty evaluations of <html><head><meta charset="utf-8"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"><title>'She bullies and berates': University of Florida ... Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and ... Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has warned Americans about "Trump's Project 2025" agenda — even though former President Donald Trump doesn't claim the ... Opinion Dr. Murthy is the surgeon general. One day when my daughter was a year old, she stopped moving her right leg. Tests found that she had a deep infection in her thigh that was dangerously close to ... Kolkata doctor's rape case: Parents remember daughter who was ... The doctor's death has sparked a nation-wide conversation on violence against women in India The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in India's Kolkata city earlier this month has sparked ... The pros and cons of the five-paragraph essay The five-paragraph essay is a writing structure typically taught in high school. Structurally, it consists of an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. This clear structure helps students connect points into a succinct argument. It's a great introductory structure, but only using this writing formula has its limitations. Should We Teach the Five-Paragraph Essay? The five-paragraph essay isn't all bad. The value lies in its usefulness as a teaching tool and as an entry-level organizational strategy for young writers. It works great as a foundation upon ... Kill the 5-Paragraph Essay The 5-paragraph essay is indeed a genre, but one that is entirely uncoupled from anything resembling meaningful work when it comes to developing a fully mature writing process. If writing is like exercise, the 5-paragraph essay is more Ab Belt than sit-up. A significant portion of the opening weeks of my first-year writing class is spent ... Why the Five-Paragraph Essay is a Problem Now—and Later Belief #1: The five-paragraph essay is a problem now. Because formulaic writing is valued in standardized testing, teachers are in a tough spot. On one hand we want our students to do well when the tests are used as gatekeepers for advancement. Teachers and schools are judged by these scores. The Five-Paragraph Essay: 5 Reasons Why It Still Relevant? Five reasons why the five-paragraph essay is still relevant. 1. Its function and form can be applied to anything and everything. The five-paragraph essay is something that stretches beyond the mere walls of the English classroom - it is a way of thinking, as much as it is a way of writing. Learning how to write the five-paragraph essay is ... How to Write a Five-Paragraph Essay, With Examples The five-paragraph essay format is a guide that helps writers structure an essay. It consists of one introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs for support, and one concluding paragraph. Because of this structure, it has been nicknamed the "hamburger essay," the "one-three-one essay," and the "three-tier essay.". Why Write A Five-Paragraph Essay? In fact, among the benefits of the five-paragraph essay are valuable opportunities for writers in terms of cognition, rhetoric, and culture. There's a reason that Bloom's Taxonomy, a hierarchy of thinking processes, lists "creation" as its most complex category: whether a student is investigating a hypothesis, building a contraption, or ... 5.5: The Five-Paragraph Essay is Rhetorically Sound The five-paragraph essay (5PE) doesn't have many vocal defenders in Departments of English in higher education, but for some instructors, the 5PE remains a useful tool in the pedagogical kit. Most college writing instructors have eschewed the 5PE, contending that it limits what writing can be, constricts writers' roles, and even arbitrarily ... Essay Writing: The Five-Paragraph Myth In an effort to help beginning writers, many teachers encourage the five-paragraph essay template. Starting with a simplistic format is not inherently a bad idea, but often students aren't told the "rest of the story": The five-paragraph essay model is certainly one possible structure for conveying ideas, but it is not the only one.Often it is not the best option, and at other times, it ... Problems With the Five Paragraph Essay and Ways To Write a Better Kind The five paragraph essay encourages students to engage only on the surface level without attaining the level of cogency demanded by college writing. In its broad, overarching style, it has a tendency to encourage overly general thesis statements that lead to poorly developed and unfocused papers. And its formulaic nature makes it prone to ... Unlearning the Five-Paragraph Essay The issue with this approach at a college level is not that a five-paragraph essay automatically produces poor writing, but rather that the college writing is asking students to move beyond reproducing ideas in a rigid structure. High school writing is not inherently bad, and a student can write very competently within a constrained structure. Should You Teach the Five-Paragraph Essay? The five-paragraph essay is a teaching tool. Most criticism of the five-paragraph essay comes down to its overuse, along with a dogmatic approach to using it in the classroom. Personally, I agree with much of that criticism. The five-paragraph essay is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Is the Five-Paragraph Essay History? The five-paragraph essay lends itself to persuasive or argumentative writing, but many other types of writing aren't well served by it, Snow pointed out. You would not use a five-paragraph essay ... The Ultimate Guide to the 5-Paragraph Essay Students can use the following steps to write a standard essay on any given topic. First, choose a topic, or ask your students to choose their topic, then allow them to form a basic five-paragraph by following these steps: Decide on your basic thesis, your idea of a topic to discuss. Decide on three pieces of supporting evidence you will use to ... My Anti-Five-Paragraph-Essay Five-Paragraph Essay First, the five-paragraph essay constricts an argument beyond usefulness or interest. In principle it reminds one of a three-partitioned dinner plate. The primary virtue of such dinner plates is that they are conveniently discarded after only one use, much like the essays themselves. The secondary virtue is to keep different foods from touching ... Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other In Why They Can't Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of ... Secrets of the Five-Paragraph Essay The five-paragraph essay consists of one introduction paragraph (with the thesis at its end), three body paragraphs (each beginning with one of three main points) and one last paragraph—the conclusion. 1-3-1. Once you have this outline, you have the basic template for most academic writing. Most of all, you have an organized way to approach ... Five-paragraph essay The five-paragraph essay is a form of essay having five paragraphs : one concluding paragraph. The introduction serves to inform the reader of the basic premises, and then to state the author's thesis, or central idea. A thesis can also be used to point out the subject of each body paragraph. When a thesis essay is applied to this format, the ... The Five-Paragraph Essay: An In-Depth Exploration of the Genre and its THE FIVE-PARAGRAPH ESSAY 4 . The Origins and Evolution of the Genre . The first step to better understanding the genre of the five-paragraph essay is looking at the history behind it. Majority of scholars believe that the origins of the five-paragraph essay can be traced back to current-traditional rhetoric in which theme writing is embedded 5.6: The Five-Paragraph Essay Transmits Knowledge The five-paragraph essay is widely believed to be useful in terms of making students assimilate, absorb, store, categorize, and organize new knowledge, but it is not useful in terms of getting students to actually use that knowledge creatively or critically for productive problem posing and solving. In this sense, the idea of knowledge transfer ... Is the 5-paragraph essay always bad? Is the 5-paragraph essay always bad? I realize, quite well thank you, that the five-paragraph essay is not always good. Sometimes it is rote, formulaic, and poorly applied. Despite that, in my freshman composition courses, I teach the five-paragraph essay because my students don't know how to write an essay at all. Am I doing the wrong thing? The evils of the Five Paragraph Essay : r/writing The 5 paragraph structure for essays makes sense when you're teaching kids to read. It helps organize thought processes and (attempts to, at least) prevents rambling, going off topic. ... thesis, and conclusion are not bad rules at all. People get hung up on the fact that the structure calls for a cookie-cutter five paragraphs. The number is ... Unlearning the Five Paragraph Essay The five paragraph essay takes meaning making out of the writer's hands. An essay is a vehicle for exploring ideas and creating meaning. In order to explore ideas, a writer makes a series of decisions about how to present, develop, and organize them. In order to create meaning, a writer decides how to sequence sentence after sentence and ... essay homework paper phd project resume review study thesis