This is part of a series exploring alternatives to the five-paragraph essay. You may also wish to read the series introduction or about collaborative essays, scripted dialogues, reading narratives, and multigenre papers.

The organic essay is one in which the form is intimately connected to the content of the essay. I do not find this easy to teach, but I do enjoy the submitted essays so much more than those that have been crammed into five neat paragraphs.

As we read through a text, I ask students to note in their ThinkBooks (journals) moments of interest or confusion. When we are finished reading, we go back through those moments and develop one or two genuine questions. I try to discourage those obvious thesis-leading questions, as students tend to hunt for those when they know an essay is coming up shortly.

Once we have those interesting questions, I ask students to start to collect any evidence that might have some bearing on the question. I encourage them to consider themselves forensic detectives in this exercise, avoiding any conclusions until they have assembled all of the relevant data.

We then begin to sort the data into relevant groups. I like to have students use mind maps or graphic organizers at this stage. Students could also write one piece of evidence on a single small piece of paper (or index card) and then pile those pieces into groups.

Once they have their groupings in place, then students get to develop a tentative thesis. I remind them again of the forensic detective approach here — their approach here should be to test their theory with the evidence at hand before developing final conclusions.

And at this point they can create an outlined structure for their essay. I ask students to write one sentence that summarizes each grouping / pile of evidence. They organize those sentences into an order that seems to best convey their evidence. Each sentence in their outline tends to become the topic sentence of a paragraph in the essay, which makes for easier drafting.

As I mentioned at the start, this is not an easy approach to teach or evaluate. Students often need to be introduced to basic classification skills before we can start this. Many of them get stumped and frustrated not having the usual five-paragraph crutch at hand.

Almost all, however, eventually wind up thinking their way through the writing process and create something worthwhile in the end.

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