[PDF] Outline for a Five-Paragraph Essay
3. Maintain a Smooth Flow: Use transition words to link your paragraphs and ideas. This helps the reader follow your argument seamlessly.
In this post, we discuss how to write a five-paragraph essay that works, regardless of subject or topic, with a simple—but effective—plan for completing a successful essay.
Believe it or not, the five-paragraph essay can be a relatively easy project once you understand how to break it down into pieces. Let's jump into that now.
How to Write a Five-Paragraph Essay That Works
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?
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.
Because it is too rigid in its over-reliance on addition, the five paragraph essay would not allow a writer to organize via emphasis, contrast, or causality. Rather the ideas would have to be presented illogically (as additions) when they should be organized according to other types of relationships which would reflect the real purpose for writing. The form itself encourages incoherence.
8. Manage Your Time: Allocate specific times for planning, writing, and revising your essay. This helps you stay organized and avoid last-minute stress. For example, spend 10 minutes outlining, 30 minutes writing, and 10 minutes proofreading for a 50-minute essay task.
Can a 5 paragraph essay be written in 10 minutes
This step is so important to writing essays that I continue to use outlines to this day for articles and blog posts, which are usually a lot more complicated than five-paragraph essays. But for your five-paragraph essay, here's a good outline to complete:
[PDF] Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay
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.
5 Paragraph Essay: Guide, Topics, Outline, Examples, Tips | EssayPro
The five paragraph essay does not encourage students to develop the ability to be critical about their own strengths and weaknesses as writers because it turns writing into a check-list of features that are either present or absent.
How to Write a Five-Paragraph Essay
Choosing a specific and interesting topic can make your essay stand out. Here are 20 more engaging that provide a good starting point for your 5-paragraph paper:
How to write a perfect 5 Paragraph Essay: A Complete Guide
The conclusion, the final paragraph, summarizes the main points discussed in the essay and restates the thesis in a new way. It provides closure to the discussion and reinforces the essay's main argument. The 5-paragraph essay format is an effective tool for teaching students how to organize their thoughts and present them clearly and logically. It is a foundational skill that serves as a building block for more complex writing tasks in the future.
How to Write an Essay: Formulas for 5-Paragraph Essay
Many students learned in high school to write what is commonly knownas the five paragraph essay. This handout is designed to help yousee the weaknesses of that syle of essay and to help you learn to writesomething more complex that that formulaic essay. The Five ParagraphEssay consists of (surprise!) five paragraphs that follow a very structuredformat. The first paragraph contains a one sentence (or maybe a twosentence) thesis statement, which is followed by three sentences that brieflydescribe what will be discussed in the three body paragraphs. Thesethree sentences are sometimes referred to as the pathway, since they showwhere the paper will go. There may then be a transitional sentenceto the next paragraph, which discusses the topic of the first pathway sentence. The next two body paragraphs develop and detail the next two pathway sentences. The conclusion, the fifth paragraph, restates and summarizes the argumentsof the essay, sometimes beginning with the phrase, In conclusion.The strength of the five paragraph essay is that it is highly structured,and fairly easy to teach. It provides a very formulaic style of writingthat many students find helpful. However, once you reach the collegelevel, the weaknesses outweigh the strengths. The five paragraphessay encourages students to engage only on the surface level without attainingthe level of cogency demanded by college writing. In its broad, overarchingstyle, it has a tendency to encourage overly general thesis statementsthat lead to poorly developed and unfocused papers. And its formulaicnature makes it prone to produce papers with stilted organization. Not to mention that it is next to impossible to write five pages of onewithout repeating yourself. The only time the five paragraph essaymay be useful in college is when you are writing answers to brief essayquestions on exams. In timed situations that do not allow you tocome up with a complex organization, the five pragraph essay format canbe helpful to structure your ideas if you are easily overwhelmed by thenumber of points you have to make.