Unlearning the five paragraph essay means unteaching it as well.
The five paragraph essay encourages its practitioners to produce a thesis with three parts and then to map those three parts onto body paragraphs followed by a conclusion.
The five paragraph essay gives the writer the false comfort of a formula into which to plug ideas. It takes the sting out of thinking—which is one of the primary challenges of writing—and promises us whatever our thoughts, we can reduce them to an over-simplified format.
You may have a list of subjects already provided. But if you have to choose your topic, pick one that can support a guiding thesis with three supporting pieces of information that can each support their own paragraphs. For instance, you might think the United States will take home the most medals at the next Summer Olympics. Can you identify three main ideas to support that claim? Or you might want to write a compare-and-contrast essay on why one restaurant is a more family-friendly spot than another. Again, can you identify three main reasons to support your thesis?
How to Write a Five-Paragraph Essay, With Outlines and an Example
The serves to inform the reader of the basic premises, and then to state the author's , or central idea. A can also be used to point out the subject of each body paragraph. When a thesis essay is applied to this format, the first paragraph typically consists of a , followed by a sentence that introduces the general theme, then another sentence narrowing the focus of the one previous. (If the author is using this format for a text-based thesis, then a sentence quoting the text, supporting the essay-writer's claim, would typically go here, along with the name of the text and the name of the author. Example: "In the book , says..."). After this, the author narrows the discussion of the topic by stating or identifying a problem. Often, an organizational sentence is used here to describe the layout of the paper. Finally, the last sentence of the first paragraph of such an essay would state the thesis the author is trying to prove. The thesis is often linked to a "road map" for the essay, which is basically an embedded outline stating precisely what the three body paragraphs will address and giving the items in the order of the presentation. Not to be confused with an organizational sentence, a thesis merely states "The book follows Elie Wiesel's journey from innocence to experience," while an organizational sentence directly states the structure and order of the essay. Basically, the thesis statement should be proven throughout the essay. In each of the three body paragraphs, one or more identified (evidence/fact/etc.) that supports the thesis statement is discussed. And in the conclusion, everything is analyzed and summed up. For example, the conclusion part in an essay about sports: "Sports can bring a bunch of benefits for youth, including general health, together with blood circulation and overall physical stamina improvement. Sport develops and improves people’s physical, social, and organizational skills, which are beneficial in personal and professional life and must always be obtained."
According to Thomas E. Nunnally and Kimberly Wesley, most teachers and professors consider the five-paragraph form ultimately restricting for fully developing an idea. Wesley argues that the form is never appropriate. Nunnally states that the form can be good for developing analytical skills that should then be expanded. Similarly, American educator David F. Labaree claims that "The Rule of Five" is "dysfunctional... off-putting, infantilising and intellectually arid" because demands for the essay's form often obscure its meaning and, therefore, largely automatize creating and reading five-paragraph essays. The five-paragraph essay format has been criticized for its rigid structure, which some educators believe stifles creativity and critical thinking. Critics argue that it promotes a formulaic approach to writing, which can limit students' ability to express more complex ideas and develop their unique writing style.
As long as you are not a stickler for nomenclature, some longer essays are also five paragraph essays when they hew to its peculiar logic of listing and mapping. Not all essays with five paragraphs are five paragraph essays when they grow organically—based on a writer’s purposes and design—rather than being held hostage to a formula.
If your thesis is not provided in the assignment, choose one that has sufficient content for discussion, or at least enough to fill five paragraphs.
UMGC Effective Writing Center Secrets of the Five-Paragraph Essay
(Note: This final paragraph does not present new ideas. Rather, it ties everything before it together into one nicely formed essay.)
Unlearning the Five Paragraph Essay - College Writing Programs
Your five-paragraph essay outline is like a blueprint where you can perfect the order and structure of your essay beforehand to save time on editing later.
[PDF] Outline for a Five-Paragraph Essay
In its crudest form, the three part thesis often devolves into identifying subjects rather than arguments and identifies the areas of focus picked up by the body paragraphs. For example, a student writer might decide to address the issue of friendship in literature, history, and personal experience. Such a tentative thesis focuses on a subject (“friendship”) and three major areas where the writer hopes to address that subject. The writer never identifies the claim about friendship to be developed in the essay, nor even wonders whether it is useful to address these claims in such disparate areas as literature, history, and personal experience. Rather, he or she just joins or adds these three disparate areas together as though they formed an automatically meaningful sequence.
[PDF] Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay
Unlearning the five paragraph essay may be a greater challenge for our students than learning how to write—with all its messiness—in the first place. As anyone who has tried to master a second language knows, the first language creates interference. We fall back on the inherited patterns of the first language which impede our mastery of the second.
How to Write a Five-Paragraph Essay That Works - Writers Digest
As you see, regardless of the topic, we can list three points about it. And if you wonder about the repetition of words and structure when stating the three points, in this case, repetition is a good thing. Words that seem redundant when close together in an outline will be separated by the actual paragraphs of your essay. So in the essay instead of seeming redundant they will be welcome as signals to the reader of your essay’s main parts.