Many bloggers have been trashing the five-paragraph essay lately: Amanda at Household Opera, Jocalo, v i t i a, Steve, and, oh yeah, I said something about it too a couple of months ago. I don't know anyone who thinks it's a good thing, except maybe for essay tests in history class, where you have to go in and write an essay in fifty minutes. I still think it's okay for that purpose only, especially if a student gets stuck and can't think of a different way to structure the essay. Mike says that the five-paragraph format is a shortcut, and "short-cuts -- whether a five-paragraph theme or a preemptive military strike -- seldom offer lasting solutions." Amanda says that "[w]hat it generates is more a list than an essay." I agree with what Amanda says when she argues (implicitly) that it's not so much the number of paragraphs as it is that the format doesn't encourage connection-making, critical thinking, or innovative ways to write introductions and conclusions--ugh, especially conclusions, which is what I'm concerned with in the post I linked to above, although I have written about introductions too.
UPDATE: A couple I missed: Cindy and Reading & Writing. Over at Making Contact, MisterBS has a good idea. He suggests that "someone should try to compile all the recent traffic on the 5PT and try to make something out of it to submit to NCTE; maybe the discussion would be opened up to secondary-level educators as well. Right now, I fear we have a bit of a post-secondary echo chamber." I think we have most of the links assembled here; what we need now is a kind of commonplace book with key quotations expressing our problems with the 5PT. When is the NCTE Conference?
So, have these bloggers said all there is to say about the five-paragraph theme (I HATE that word)? Anyone here got anything to add?
5-paragraph essays
can anyone point me to work that's been done on the 5-paragraph essay (articles and such)?
Just remember that it's not the form that's ever offensive -- haiku, sonnets, and sestinas are also forms. And you can't get away from producing arguments based on the golden trio of true, good, and beautiful; if you add an introduction and a conclusion, you have a western "complete feeling" of what five gives. (Chinese argument had the "bagu," an eight-legged essay form.)
Our stance againt 5-paragraph essays are really because they're "reader-based" prose, and we as writers tend to like teaching "writer-based" prose.
But both are important. When it gets down to it, once again, this argument against the 5-paragraph essay is really an argument against denegrating writing and the instruction of it to the position of service to the university: of teaching students to write for, as ClancyRatliff says, their "history class."
Let's see this argument for what it really is: an acknowledgment that writing is MORE than service: writing is a discipline in its own right, and although the 5-paragraph form allows teachers of other disciplines to read quickly for main points, reader-based prose does not allow the writer to "shine" except through their presentation of the information that the reader is looking for.
That's not a fault of the form: that's what it's GOOD for.
Readers of reader-based prose are looking for answers, they're not looking to get to know the student. They're not looking for creativity or personality in writing. They're looking for answers.
And a thesis-driven essay provides answers in predictable places for readers who want to see them quickly and then get on with their lives.
And who better to teach this form than writers who understand how to write to readers?
Let's make the right argument: not AGAINST the teaching of writing in service to other classes, but FOR the teaching of writing in service to the student -- for writing as epistemic, as a way of coming to know, and as a way of taking power in the world.
5 Paragraph Theme
I ran across the bagu in connection with some case study research I presented at CCCC '03. Apparently, it was really used only for the much-feared and tradition-laden government service exams (I think this is the source of that.)
More generally, I agree that "it's not the form that's...offensive," with the emendation that when it's only about the form, the form becomes a kind of script (both in the dramatic--predetermined--and in the programming--automating complex functions--sense), the presence of which becomes the shibboleth of what makes a (good/clear/etc.) piece of writing.
I've been trolling around looking for articles of the type deanya mentioned. I've found a few things, though they're all anecdotal. Probably better for a lay audience than lots of data would be.
Edit: Also, I think much of this was touched off in response to the flak the TAAS is getting right now. See particularly Body & Soul and a response at CalPundit. I find the comments on the Calpundit post particularly interesting (in, admittedly, a slightly depressing way)
Another update: Jocalo posts
Another update: Jocalo posts his five paragraphs in 500 words address to CCCC.
CultureCat
"taught"
"Our young people have had the thinking beaten out of them. We do it in our classrooms, in what we have them write."
I'm fond of Lynn Stratton's Taught to Remove All Thought, published about a year or so ago, fond enough that I usually hand it out first day of classes to my FYC students.
cgb
Reader- versus Writer-Based Prose
Actually, Deanya, I think you've inverted the way Linda Flower originally tried to problematize "writer-based prose" and the ways in which Peter Elbow subsequently tried to complicate its implicit opposing term. Both were making arguments about ethos, and while Peter muddled/complicated the issue in the way only he can, bless him, reader-based prose isn't only about strip-mining for data. It's a heuristic for writers as much as (if not much more than) it is a filter for teachers, as I pointed out in my (now less certain) points about the forensic oration. The distinction between "reader-based" and "writer-based" prose, as crude and reductive as it is, is made by Flower and Elbow about invention, not about consumption -- and so I'll gladly agree with part of your conclusion, as it's very much in line with what Flower and Elbow were saying.
On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, if I want students to provide answers "in predictable places", I'll give them a multiple-choice bubble-sheet test. Teaching genre conventions is valuable, yes -- but it's also the least difficult and the least time-consuming part of a composition teacher's job.
--
Mike
http://www.vitia.org/
Genre conventions can be time-consuming
Hmm.... let me put in a word for genre here, if I may.
Although I don't teach technical writing anymore, I split my teaching time pretty evenly between composition and tech writing for the last 5 years. Simply learing the rhyme scheme doesn't make you a poet; there is room within any given structure for any writer to develop and work towards excellence.
The five-paragraph-essay is not the only kind of writing college students are expected to produce. General forms such as the resume, lab report, the proposal, the "bad news letter" (such as what a student might write when e-mailing a prof to request an extension) all expect the writer to put certain kinds of information in certain places. While composition theory isn't my specialty, it doesn't seem to me that examining the conventions of the college essay is that simple. If it was, students wouldn't lose so many points writing incomprehensible essays.
Dennis G. Jerz
Jerz's Literacy Weblog