The pain of the five paragraph essay

Much of my purpose in teaching is about inspiring students to want to learn more and to communicate clearly what they learn with others. I am bent on encouraging students to stretch themselves, push their thinking, take academic risks, feel confident that they can overcome any obstacle, and feel empowered that they can make real change in the world. But then there is the five paragraph essay.

It’s not that I am totally against this prescriptive way of writing. I think it is an important way for students to start to learn to organize their ideas and create cogent and articulate arguments on paper. But for 8^th graders, it seems its formulaic nature tends to prevent students from thinking rather than promoting and encouraging conceptualization. On top of that it makes them begin to dislike writing.

Essay writing for my students seems to put them in a mental tight jacket, not to set their minds free. Does it really help students to think? My strongest students usually are able to handle this. The students who have not developmentally crossed the threshold of thinking more abstractly and conceptually, end up getting the structure right, but haven’t pushed themselves in the direction of really thinking. In fact, it makes them afraid to think. They may come up with three ideas, but just juxtaposing them does not necessarily connect them. It keeps them on the surface of thinking not urged to go deep and take real conceptual risks.

Parke Muth, Senior Assistant Dean and Director of International Admission at the University of Virginia, calls them McEssays in the college application essays he reads:

Ninety percent of the applications I read contain what I call McEssays – usually five-paragraph essays that consist primarily of abstractions and unsupported generalization. They are technically correct in that they are organized and have the correct sentence structure and spelling, but they are boring. Sort of like a Big Mac. I have nothing against Big Macs, but the one I eat in Charlottesville is not going to be fundamentally different from the one I eat in Paris, Peoria or Palm Springs. I am not going to rave about the quality of a particular Big Mac. The same can be said about the generic essay. …. A McEssay is not wrong, but it is not going to be a positive factor in the admission decision. It will not allow a student to stand out.

Joseph Smigelski, a community college teacher, writes in his “Why Tiffany Can’t Write” at the Huffington Post:

This is the drill, the formula, the mind-numbing process: In your first paragraph, Tiffany, you must state a thesis, the main idea that you will develop throughout the rest of your essay, and this thesis should be the last sentence in the paragraph. In your second, third, and fourth paragraphs, you must support your thesis with three components of evidence, examples, or illustrations — one component per paragraph. And in your final paragraph, the fifth, you must present your conclusion, which is a restatement of your thesis in different words along with a little extra tag to give your reader something to ponder further.

Can any bit of instruction be more stilted, unimaginative, and soul-crushing? Don’t actually counsel Tiffany on how to think out and articulate a problem or a story; just give her a freakin’ formula that can be chalked up on a blackboard in five minutes.

Again, I am not against form and believe that there can be great freedom with limitations. I also know that at schools like Exeter, students are not exposed to this form of writing until 12^th grade, because the emphasis is on the quality of the writing process.

Maybe I feel this way because I just finished grading 45 essays and was remarkably disappointed in my inability to help my students grasp this structure as only a starting point and to better help them plumb the depths of the ideas with which they were grappling.  In conversation, they are much better at doing this. On paper, obviously, something else happens.

However, there was one student who creatively connected threads and ideas, but threw the format out the window. Her paper was loosely structured, but it was rich in creative thinking. Reading it, I literally felt the author’s ideas flow out of the writing itself. I felt engaged in the process of her thinking. There were a few other papers that used the form well, but the majority were almost like lists– example/ evidence/ interpretation– in lock step toward the conclusion. Clearly uninspired.

I want my students to love writing and they mostly do except when it comes to essays. They don’t always balk at form and in fact feel safely held by form in writing sonnets, haiku, sestinas. They have deep and profound ideas in class discussion but clearly are more challenged by structuring those same ideas on paper. My students are much more resourceful and imaginative in their creative writing, but seem to be afraid to use these very same skills in writing essays. What is up with all of this?