Unlearning the five paragraph essay means unteaching it as well.
I have to say, this is my favorite paragraph to teach. The introduction paragraph is what draws readers into the essay and makes them want to read more.
Through the process of getting to know the characters and watching the piece expand from a long short story into a novella, I realized I had to abandon my original conceit, the constraint of a series of five-paragraph essays that were to bring me boundless creativity. While the narrative had prompts for free writes and free writes from the student, both further revealing the professor and the student, the five-paragraph essay had not yet made an appearance. The narrative no longer needed three of them to mark time. The narrative now took place in an academic year, not a semester. I must say, I wasn’t eager to write the five-paragraph essay I knew the book needed. I had written enough from the student’s perspective that I knew her. Her final class essay had to represent a maturity of her voice. But the five-paragraph essay is often thought of as facile and stale, the opposite of mature, fully realized work. As Warner writes in an Inside Higher Ed essay: “The 5-paragraph essay is indeed a genre, but one that is entirely uncoupled from anything resembling meaningful work when it comes to developing a fully mature writing process.” I consulted books, doing the research the student would have done, inhabiting her, and then I wrote, following the rules and structures of the five-paragraph essay with the precision I had always hoped my students would, creating for her and for the narrative a piece of insight in five paragraphs. I had a teacher say to me once, “What’s the point of just writing parts of the essay? They need to write the entire five paragraphs to get all of the practice they need.” An essay comes in different forms and assigning a student to do a five-paragraph essay is a way of measuring his basic writing skills. As with the other types of essays, there is always a certain rule to follow. Every time you are assigned to write a five-paragraph essay, make sure you check these tips. I have been teaching five paragraph essay structure and everything that goes with it for several years now. I hope that after you read this blog post, you will have a good understanding of how to teach and grade five paragraph essays. While a five-paragraph essay forces an organizational paradigm onto your paper, the schemes we’ve explored in this series should help you take control of your essay. In the introduction, you should state your topic, as well as your thesis statement, your position regarding the subject matter, and the three reasons or bases of your stance. The introductory paragraph should tell the reader what is your essay all about. It must be an attention-grabber and must also include a transition sentence in the end.
Here are some common and trending topics for 5-paragraph essays:
Leif Fearn
Leif Fearn' writes in an earlier message responding to Kim's post
about ways to teach organization/transition/critical
thinking/writing without using a 5 paragraph theme unit:
>
> This is starting to feel like instruction. I have a feelingthat students
> who come out the other end of your chute will have a measure of direct
> control over what they do when they write, and if such a plan were
> articulated through perhaps five grades, the resulting students wouldbe
> able to write well on purpose, not on faith and hope.
Transition Words For Essays - The Ultimate List For 2025
A five-paragraph essay is usually given to students as an assignment and is rarely used by professional writers. It is a way of helping students develop and organize their ideas when writing. Practicing also helps students as it is useful when it comes to answering essay questions during exams. And from the word itself, a five-paragraph essay is composed of five paragraphs – the introductory paragraph, the three main body paragraphs, and the concluding paragraph. As it may sound easy, writing this type of essay requires a good transition that will link each of the said paragraphs. So here are a few tips on how to write a five-paragraph essay.
Which is arguably the most important part of a five-paragraph essay?
Kim Ballard
Although I have been doing my own version of 'research' over the years,
I naively assumed nobody else would be interested, so have little data
to quote. However, I am now going to be keeping better recordsof my
research. I do need some clarification on your sentence:
some classroom-level action research on the influence of front-loaded
linear writing schemes, not only on learning organization in general,
but on organization through the genres?>---so that I can see how that
fits in with my writing focus. Nancy K
This is starting to feel like instruction. I have a feeling thatstudents
who come out the other end of your chute will have a measure of direct
control over what they do when they write, and if such a plan were
articulated through perhaps five grades, the resulting students wouldbe
able to write well on purpose, not on faith and hope.
Which paragraph in a five-paragraph essay contains the hook?
The five-paragraph theme, outlined in Figure 1, is probably what you’re used to: the introductory paragraph starts broad and gradually narrows to a thesis, which readers expect to find at the very end of that paragraph.