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Alternatives to the five-paragraph essay: Series Introduction

October 29, 2008 By 6 Comments

This semester I have been thinking about, reading about, and looking up alternatives to the five paragraph essay. I feel that I’m at a good point in my learning to take stock of what I’ve discovered and invite some feedback.

It probably comes as no surprise that I have become disenchanted with the five paragraph (or 32-sentence) essay. Why? I believe that thoughtful writing is a critical skill that we teachers have the opportunity to encourage our students to develop. I do not believe that every piece of thoughtful writing can be expressed in five neat paragraphs: introduction, three arguments, and conclusion. I believe that the structure of writing should emerge from the ideas and assist in expressing them, rather than strong-arming them into a neat format that, coincidentally, is easy to mark.

Five-paragraph essays are tidy; emerging thinking is not. I wonder if by relying on formulaic writing we are insulating ourselves from the messiness of teaching students how to develop and express an opinion? Teaching a form is relatively easy: a couple of fill-in-the-blank forms go a long way to completing the lesson. Encouraging students to develop and express their ideas is entirely different.

So in the upcoming days, I’ll examine alternatives to the five-paragraph essay that I’ve encountered. Some of these alternatives I’ve tried out in some fashion; some I haven’t yet.

Here’s what’s in store:

  • Collaborative essays
  • Scripted dialogue
  • Reading narratives
  • Multi-genre papers
  • And what I’m calling “The Organic Essay”

One final note: Many of you will recognize Bruce Pirie’s fingerprints all over this series. It would be hard to overestimate the impact that his writing has had on my own teaching practice. If you haven’t read his Reshaping High School English or Teenage boys and high school English, I cannot recommend them highly enough. (If you’re an Ontario teacher, you can borrow a copy from the Ontario College of Teachers library — if I don’t have it out at the time, of course.)

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Image by tosaytheleast

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Five paragraphs: Impediment or support?

March 19, 2008 By 5 Comments

One of my colleagues, who is one of our school’s best teachers of the essay, was commenting on a recent collection of student-submitted essays. She was pleased to have Gr. 11 College-level students submitting substantial essays several pages in length a day early – a medal-winning accomplishment in my opinion.

It was her next comment that prompted this post. She remarked that all of the essays were in the standard five-paragraph form, but despite this, students weren’t expressing their ideas well.

I’ve been mulling this over since. I wonder if it’s more a case of students not expressing their ideas well because of the five-paragraph form, rather than despite it?

As I’ve mentioned, Bruce Pirie’s Reshaping High School English has heavily influenced my thinking about teaching writing. He questions the five paragraph essay format (comparing it to painting by numbers), stating that,

… an initial concern for the organic growth of ideas is overtaken by a concern for regularized form, with the machinery of topic sentences, paragraphs, and single controlling ideas. (76)

It certainly feels like form has dominated ideas in our teaching culture. When I hear a colleague wondering about the discrepancy between success with the form and success in communication, I am reminded of Pirie’s claims as to what the five-paragraph form actually teaches :

  • there are rules to writing
  • ideas can be forced into a cookie-cutter form
  • structure is all-important because students’ success is based on their use of the assigned format
  • and at the same time, structure is not important because students don’t have to find an appropriate form for their ideas

I think Pirie’s right. And if this is what the five-paragraph essay actually teaches, then it should be no surprise to us educators to find our students meeting the form expectations without actually saying anything worthwhile.

I am on the hunt for more authors discussing this tension between form and the growth of ideas. Serendipitously, I came across Doug Noon‘s comments about teaching writing based on Graff and Birkenstein’s book They Say / I Say:

Graff and Birkenstein feel that it isn’t enough to say true things that conform to a thesis statement, and support it with evidence, which is how the essay form is conventionally taught. They remind us that in the real world, people don’t usually express themselves without some provocation. Our writing is improved, they say, when we include the voices of the provocateurs in what we have to say.

They Say / I Say sounds like the type of work I’m looking for, and I have it in my shopping cart right now. None too soon, either, as I see from my course outlines that I am to be teaching the essay form to at least two classes in the next month.

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Reading Reflections: Reshaping High School English

February 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’ve liberally sprinkled this blog and its sister website with references to Bruce Pirie’s Reshaping High School English, so it’s high time I gave it a review.

Rating: 5/5

Reshaping High School English is a decade old, but the ideas in it are fresh and for many of us English teachers, quite revolutionary.

Some of the key ideas that I took away were:

  • Reading skills need to be taught to adolescents, and the best way to do that is by modelling reading. Conducting “think-aloud” readings of texts regularly is key.
  • Writing is a mysterious process for most of us, including us teachers. To teach it, we need to model it authentically in all of its glorious, messy uncertainty. Let your students watch you write a poem on a topic of their choice.
  • The five-paragraph essay is not the pinnacle of writing as some of us English teachers tend to speak of it. This is because,
    (a) ideas can be shared in other forms of writing, like a poem, short story, or play; and
    (b) some essays, crazily enough, actually hold together with paragraphs numbering more than five. It’s true: there are six-paragraph essays out there that are worth reading.

Pirie has challenged me to consider how I structure class time and how I go about the business of teaching students reading and writing. It’s probably best read with a group willing to talk about it, making it perfect for an English department book club or discussion group.

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