The five paragraph essay, like so many terms in the ELA curriculum,
gives a totally misleading impression to students. Some of them
hang on to the wrong impression even after they grow up and become
writing teachers.
A 5 'graf essay may not have 5 'grafs
You may hear English teachers say "nobody writes 5 paragraph
essays," which is true if you think the term refers to
a written product.
However, if you consider the five paragraph essay as a process,
that process becomes useful for preparing material
for a wide array of writing and speaking situations. I
use it every day for my own writing. Years after they leave my
class, my students use it every day because I taught the 5 paragraph
essay the way I use it: as a strategic process for systematically
thinking about a writing project.
Sad to say, some teachers do give students those erroneous impressions.
Don't let students think the goal is exactly 5 paragraphs
each of which contains exactly 3 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.
5 paragraph essay as process
Your life will be easier and your students will learn to write
more readily if you teach the five paragraph essay as a way
of thinking about a subject that could be turned into
an expository essay five paragraphs long rather than suggesting it is a document that must have exactly five paragraphs and be written exactly a certrain way.
If you teach essay-writing as a process, you can honestly tell
your supervisor you are teaching critical
thinking strategies.
The systematic analysis that the five paragraph essay entails
certainly is critical thinking and the way you teach that thinking
is through a series of strategies.
Plan on teaching planning
When you teach the five-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.
One trick for getting students to plan their essays is structured
peer learning activities in which students help students. My Talk
It Out duplication masters give questions students can
use to help each other plan expository essays.
Critical thinking in the process
The way I teach it, the process of preparing a 5 paragraph essay
involves learning and using a series of critical thinking strategies.
Each strategy guides writers through a systematic assessment
of their options at a given stage of the writing process.
Such strategic thinking is efficient: writers don't waste
time wondering what to do next. And by using a strategy, writers
determine what they don't need to do or think about, eliminating
wasting time later.
9 critical thinking strategies I teach
Withing the 5 paragraph essay writing
process, I teach strategies for:
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
as a strategic process.
Learn about why the five paragraph essay is particularly well
suited to teaching struggling
writers.
