The 5 paragraph essay:
Its planning focus is ideal for beginners

Think of the 5 paragraph essay as training wheels for writers. Once students can do the written equivalent of steering, balancing, and pedaling simultaneously, they won't need the 5 paragraph format any more.

We must capitalizes on the value of the expository writing process for beginners without implying that it is the only way to write or suggesting that all essays have just 5 paragraphs.

Sad to say, some teachers do give students those erroneous impressions.

Plan on teaching planning

When you teach the 5 paragraph essay, you should expect to spend most of your time teaching planning strategies.

Not only is planning really tough for beginning writers, but it is the activity with the greatest potential to improve students' writing and students' grades quickly. Even students who don't care about having better writing don't mind having better grades.

The 5 paragraph essay as a process

Teach the 5 paragraph essay as a way of thinking about a subject that could be turned into an expository essay five paragraphs long.

If you teach essay-writing this way, you can honestly tell your supervisor you are teaching critical thinking strategies. The systematic analysis that the 5 paragraph essay entails certainly is critical thinking.

The planning process may yield five paragraphs, or it might produce a book. It might produce a persuasive essay, but it could just as easily show the writer that she needs to develop her material as a narrative essay instead.

Gathering the prescribed amount of material is an attempt to be sure writers have appropriate material from which to choose content that will be effective with their readers.

5¶ essay may not have 5 paragraphs

Don't let students think the goal is exactly 5 paragraphs each of which contains exactly three points. Students who write with those numerical goals in mind produce the awful prose that the 5 paragraph essay detractors abominate.

(On the other hand, you don't need to tell students first day of class that they can get by with writing fewer than 5 paragraphs. Cross that bridge when you come to it. )

Some students will never find themselves in situations where the standard 5 paragraph product is out of place. When you teach the 5 paragraph essay as a process instead of a product, it becomes useful for preparing material for a wide array of writing and speaking situations. I use it daily for writing everything from textbooks to marketing materials.

Students who need or want to write in other ways will find it easier to learn other genres and to develop material to fit in those genres if they previously learned to think about writing projects using the 5 paragraph essay process.

Let writing become reinforcing

Preparing a working thesis and writing skeleton™ are planning strategies. Both can be taught and learned by formulas. Because they affect the total piece of writing, students can make huge changes in their essays by changes to one of those few sentences.

By teaching students to plan before they write, you let the act of writing become reinforcing. If the first sentence Josh writes is a sensible working thesis sentence, that initial success makes it more likely that he will go on to prepare a 3-sentence writing skeleton™.

By contrast, the popular writers' workshop strategy that has students write and rewrite to find their thesis does not give positive reinforcement soon enough to be effective with beginning writers or with writers who have learning difficulties.

Let students work in short bursts

Beginning writers do better work if they work in several short sessions. The sessions need to be arranged so students end each session with something finished.

For example, if students have a fairly restricted topic, they usually can prepare a working thesis and writing skeleton™ in a half hour. Because those items are written in full sentences, students not only reach closure, but also have no difficulty picking up the work later to do the next step.

My recommendation is that beginners write an essay in five stages over 5 to 10 days. The approximate time beginners should devote to the task is in parentheses. Each of the sessions ends with one task finished.

How long will students need at each stage?

Once students know what to do and have had a bit of practice, I suggest beginning writers ought to be able to complete various stages of their essays in roughly the following times:

Session 1: Prepare working thesis and writing skeleton™ (30 minutes).

Session 2: Complete a full-sentence plan (30–45 minutes).

Session 3: Compose (draft) the essay (60 minutes).

Session 4: Revise the essay (15 minutes)

Session 5. Edit the essay for three mechanical errors one at a time (5-15 minutes per error).

Your students may take more or less time, but beginners shouldn't be allowed to spend much more time at one sitting. Taking a lot more time is usually a symptom of lack of focus. Students develop a distaste for writing if it takes too long—even if the reason it takes long that they were woolgathering.

Minimize pre-draft writing

Many students who are just starting to learn to write expository essays find the physical act of writing difficult. Minimize the amount of handwriting they must do so they can concentrate on planning.

You can make graphic organizers in minutes using the Tables function in your word processing program and print them for students. See some on my page about the outline template.

Or set up a table on the computer and let students input their plans there. Then they can use copy and paste to eliminate some of the drudgery.