20131010.0847

As might be expected from a person whose profession involves understanding the writing others have done and cultivating the ability of others to write, and many of whose leisure activities involve putting words on a page in some semblance of reasonable order, I spend a fair bit of my time thinking about writing.  Those thoughts sometimes lead me into interesting places, including one that came about with my students yesterday as I was offering a demonstration of one way to get started thinking about a particular kind of paper (the details are not important).

Those who teach writing at the college level often find themselves in the position of having to deconstruct or modify the beliefs about writing and about the world that have been inculcated into students through years in public education systems which, understandably, spend their time teaching test-taking strategies.  (I write "understandably" because the alternative is the closure of schools and the dismissal of faculty and staff, with consequences to communities that can be easily understood with a small bit of thought.)  Among those beliefs is one in the supremacy of the five-paragraph essay.  While the form is a useful teaching tool, and there is nothing inherently wrong with the form as a form, the problem with the pattern is how it is applied to students.  Years of having to write a five-paragraph essay on every major exam tends to leave them convinced that the only way to write is as a five-paragraph essay.  Every piece of writing has to open with a single introductory paragraph that states a thesis and outlines three points, move into a body consisting of three paragraphs that each develop a single point, and end with a concluding paragraph that restates the thesis and the three main points; all too often, each paragraph has to have five to seven sentences.

There is something here of the old bit about what things look like when the only available tool is a hammer, I think.

Again, there is nothing necessarily wrong with the form in and of itself, and it is useful as a teaching tool in that it obliges students to think about rhetorical orders and structures of support.  But it does tend to limit students' thinking, and it frequently forces them into awkward, choppy prose that is far from pleasant to read.  Accordingly, I (and others) spend a fair bit of time trying to get students away from reliance on the five-paragraph form.  Yet, as I read what others write, and even at much of my own writing, I find that many shorter pieces (such as blog entries and letters to editors) take what is, more or less, a five-paragraph form.  Maybe they offer two introductory paragraphs and meld the conclusion into the third point of discussion.  Maybe they only argue two points instead of the expected three.  But they still follow the basic structure that is hammered into students' heads across a decade or more of schooling, and I am obliged to wonder what it shows about us that we write in such a way--even if it only takes me four paragraphs to do it today.