| Home | Back |
The most important rule of writing is that there are no rules. That being said, we can distinguish good expository writing from bad by discerning whether there is a coherent, structured argument and an orderly presentation of ideas. Writing well is difficult even for the highly literate, so it is understandable that instructors would want to give students some sort of template to use as a crutch to ensure that their essays are not random assortments of disconnected ideas. Nonetheless, such templates run the risk of serious abuse in the hands of overzealous instructors who would stifle the creativity of their best students by forcing them into the straitjacket of a highly artificial format.
The "Five Paragraph Essay" is the most commonly taught format in U.S. secondary schools, and its poor implementation has prompted many college instructors to explicitly denounce the format, encouraging students to free themselves from the arbitrary norms imposed by high school teachers. Among the problems with the Five Paragraph Essay are its rigidity, repetitiveness, banality, and weakness as an argument. Some teachers have gone as far as to specify the number of sentences in each part of each paragraph. I will spare the reader such details, but recapitulate the basic structure of the format:
The Five Paragraph Essay is absurdly repetitive for such a brief composition, and even in the most expert hands, it can produce nothing but banalities. There is no such thing as a five paragraph essay as a real genre, and if there were, such a brief work would not need an introduction and conclusion. As an argument, it is abysmal because it discusses only supporting evidence, and does not address counter-arguments. Unfortunately, many small-minded high school teachers impose this pablum as if it were the "correct" and "only" way to write an expository essay, when no real writer uses this format. There are only guidelines to good writing, not rules, and it is profoundly ignorant to impose such a mechanistic structure on essay writing as if it were a mandate, when it should at most be a learning aid.
Despite these shortcomings, there are several meritorious points in the Five Paragraph Essay format that enable students to develop good habits in organizing the structure of their essays. These points may be brought out by substantially revising the format, eliminating its unnecessary restrictions and emphasizing its purely pedagogical purpose. To this end, we present:
The first step to reforming the teaching of the five paragraph essay is to recognize that essay formats are only guidelines, not rules. Unfortunately, several major standardized tests require the five paragraph format for essay questions, which are graded based on conformity to this arbitrary structure. This teaches students nothing about how to write, rewarding bad writing that fits the stilted format, and punishing good writing that does not. There is nothing magical about the number five, and no reason why a short subject essay should not have more paragraphs. We should not have to artificially restrict our number of supporting ideas to three, but subdivide our work in whatever enumeration happens to be best suited to the particular subject. Thus the first correction to the Five Paragraph Essay is to redefine our subject:
Now that we've removed this arbitrary constraint of five paragraphs, we are free to develop our ideas, and make the essay format conform to our argument, rather than the other way around. In other words, we must first have some idea about what we want to say and how we want to say it. This means identifying a central idea/thesis, and various ideas that either support or qualify the thesis. In contrast to the standard Five Paragraph Essay, we want to include ideas that would contradict our thesis, and address the issues that they raise. We can briefly outline our ideas by simply listing them, rather than using the cumbersome and stifling format of:
This type of outline can get hairy rather quickly, and defeats the purpose of outlining. An outline is supposed to make it easier for us to organize our ideas, but by forcing ourselves to organize everything this well so soon actually makes our task more difficult than if we just started writing the essay directly. First, just write a list of your ideas, and if there are many of them, try to group them into several topics that go together. There is no reason for more than a two-tiered outline: topics and specific ideas. If you're comfortable with more complex outlines, go ahead, but if you're not, remember that the outline is supposed aid you in writing, rather than you becoming a slave to the outline. One advantage of a more flexible outline is that it becomes easier to edit your essay if you need to add or discard ideas.
The length of the introduction should be proportionate to the length of the essay. For most college-level essays, a 1-2 paragraph introduction should suffice. An introduction ought to contain the following components:
The general guideline for body paragraphs is one idea per paragraph. Naturally, each sentence contains many ideas, but everything in a given paragraph should be closely related to a specific idea. It usually helps the reader to state this idea explicitly in a topic sentence, either at the beginning or end of the paragraph. You should ask yourself about each paragraph: what is the point of this paragraph? The answer to that question should be your topic sentence. If you have difficulty answering this question, you may want to consider omitting the paragraph or radically rewriting it.
Remember, paragraph structure exists for the benefit of the reader, helping him digest the essay in smaller portions, and to see at a glance the flow of the argument. For most of history, paragraph breaks were not used, so this structure is not essential to good writing. It should be regarded as a convenience to the reader, not a constraint on the author. Nonetheless, it is helpful to be attentive to the length of your paragraphs, as they may be an indication that your essay is rambling and losing focus. The discipline of breaking long paragraphs up into distinct ideas, and associating supporting sentences with each idea or topic helps keep your argument organized, coherent, and readable.
The main idea of a paragraph ought to be clearly conveyed, in an explicit topic sentence if necessary. You should also clarify how this idea is related to your thesis, if this not self-evident. A main idea can be one of three types:
This expanded vision of what a body paragraph can be borrows from a template used in French schools for a four paragraph essay, consisting of Introduction, Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. This dialectical model is a stronger method of argumentation, and it also lacks the repetitiveness of the Five Paragraph Essay. Nonetheless, like all writing templates, it is too restrictive if followed rigidly. There is no reason why there should only be four paragraphs, and for complex essays, there may be many theses, antitheses, and syntheses in varying degrees. There is similar flexibility in the ordering of paragraphs, so there is no reason why all the antithesis paragraphs should be grouped together, for example. Structure should be constrained only by the logic of an argument, not by some arbitrary "rule" of writing essays.
Here is a sample structure of body paragraphs:
There is no required order here, save that a synthesis paragraph should be preceded by an antithesis paragraph (otherwise, what would it be synthesizing?). An antithesis may be a response to a supporting thesis of an earlier paragraph, or an unrelated objection to your overall thesis. Sometimes antitheses are not weighty enough to merit their own paragraph, so these can be omitted or incorporated into the appropriate supporting thesis paragraph. Similarly, some syntheses are sufficiently simple to merit omission or incorporation into the appropriate antithesis paragraph. This distinction of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is simply an analytical tool to help you organize your arguments and identify any omissions. For each supporting thesis, consider whether there are any objections. For each antithesis, consider how it can be reconciled with your thesis or whether your thesis needs to be modified.
All body paragraphs should be explicitly or implicitly linked to your main idea. If this is not possible in some cases, you should consider omitting that paragraph as irrelevant.
Writing the conclusion should be the most rewarding part of the essay, since the labor of proving the thesis was done in the body, so all that remains is to reap the rewards of asserting your results and what you think it all means. Unfortunately, this opportunity where individuality might shine is too often foiled by format-minded instructors who reduce the conclusion to a mere summary repeating what has already been said. Not only is this boring to read, but it also gives the impression that no progress was made during the essay. An expository essay ought to be a journey, and the conclusion is the destination. If the conclusion were to merely restate the thesis of the essay, it would seem we have learned nothing in the body.
In the course of the essay, your thesis should have been subjected to scrutiny that enables us to emerge with a deeper understanding of the subject. The conclusion should show how you've proven the thesis, illustrating our progress, including any caveats or qualifications that some of the antitheses may have brought to light. It is also a good idea to show why this thesis is important, and speculate on some of its possible implications. These speculations may be followed by a call for further research of the new issues your thesis raises. A conclusion such as this leaves the reader hungering for more, as he is not only persuaded of the validity of your thesis, but also tantalized with new possibilities. This style of conclusion allows for much more expressiveness of creativity, as there is more room for speculative opinion.
Templates such as the Five Paragraph Essay may be useful pedagogical tools if they are understood to be aids, not mandates. Clearly, college-level writing and beyond must evolve far beyond the use of these crutches. Even at an earlier age, the more talented students should not be handicapped by a rigid, arbitrary structure, as this will only stunt their development as writers. Still, it may be credibly argued that such templates are useful for beginners, such as middle school students or those learning English as a foreign language. This may be so, but students should quickly progress beyond this technique, and never mistake it for real writing. A high school writing curriculum that goes no further than the Five Paragraph Essay is a program that fails to teach writing.
The practice of good writing cannot be reduced to simple formulas, making it extremely difficult to teach writing. It is wrongheaded to circumvent this difficulty by imposing an arbitrary standard of correctness that is easier to teach and grade. Our current fixation with standardized tests has helped resuscitate the Five Paragraph Essay, as several state and national exams actually require this format for essay questions. Such exams do not test writing ability, but proficiency in the worthless skill of following a format that is not used in any genre.
Perhaps a small niche might be found for the Five Paragraph Essay in timed short essay exams, as are common in college. The format is easy to remember and follow, so when pressed for time, one can resort to it to produce a quick, organized essay. However, if time is truly a constraint, a three paragraph essay would be a much better option, to save yourself useless repetition in the introduction and conclusion. One or two introductory sentences in the first paragraph, followed by a couple of concluding sentences in the third paragraph, will suffice. This will allow you to focus on the meat of your argument in the body, upon the substance of which you will be graded, assuming your instructor is not a format-driven zombie.
Structure and style do count for a lot in writing, but these are more plastic concepts than the template-pushers are willing to recognize. I hope to have outlined above the bare necessities of good organization of expository essays. The details of this organization, like the contents of the essay, are best left to the individual author.
© 2006 Daniel J. Castellano. All rights reserved. http://www.arcaneknowledge.org