Five paragraph essay strategy
Ripples reveal what you know

The five paragraph essay is mega-misery for beginning writers and struggling writers unless someone teaches them strategies they can memorize and reuse forever.

Who needs strategies?

For struggling writers, learning effective strategies for getting ready to compose can make the difference between failing and passing.

Not all struggling writers struggle because of learning disabilities or limited intelligence. Some struggle because they are very bright, have oodles of ideas, but lack strategies for narrowing their ideas to a writable configuration.

Even students who have good writing skills can profit from learning strategic thinking skills that speed up the writing process.

What is strategic thinking?

Strategic thinking is systematically thinking through the steps of a process designed to accomplish a specific, clearly targeted goal. To make the process efficient, the thinker has to

• Understand

• Memorize

• Use

the strategy repeatedly so that the series of steps becomes an automatic response.

Engaging in strategic thinking is rather like having little macros you run in your head to automate routine thinking tasks.

The process I teach for creating a thesis statement is a strategy. The process of creating a writing skeleton™ for a five paragraph essay is another. It isn't too big a stretch to say that even the five paragraph essay itself is a strategy.

Finding evidence in ripples

An efficient way to plan the evidence for a five paragraph essay essay is a strategic thinking skill I call ripple strategy. Ripple strategy is a kind of focused brainstorming.

Just as a pebble dropped into water creates ever wider ripples, the ripple strategy lets students systematically examine their knowledge — and their ignorance — to determine what evidence may work for the five paragraph essay they are planning.

It asks writers to systematically consider

• Personal experience or observation they have or can get.

• Second hand (unpublished) experience or observation they have or can get.

• Published experience, observation, or opinion they have or can get.

The writer is the central figure. The other sources are increasingly distant from the writer, just as ripples are increasingly distant from the pebble's entry point.

Ripple strategy is built my peer learning activity Talk It Out.

Apply ripples to writing skeleton™

Instead of asking students what they know about their writing topic, ask students to apply the ripple strategy to their writing skeleton™.

Each point of the writing skeleton™ for a five paragraph essay is the topic sentence for a body paragraph. Writers must supply evidence supporting that point. By applying the ripple strategy to each topic sentence, writers can quite readily examine the evidence that is potentially available to them.

Teach writers to run through potential evidence for each topic sentence in turn using the ripple strategy.

If students have a textbook formula five paragraph essay with three body paragraphs, then they would need to use the ripple strategy three times as they think about evidence they can use to support their points.

Kinds of evidence in each ripple

Before writers can use the ripple strategy to help plan a five paragraph essay, they have to know the kinds of evidence that might be found in each ring.

Personal experience

In the first ring, the ring of personal experience, writers look first at whether they have personally experience with the topic of the topic sentence they are examining. If the writing situation makes personal evidence undesirable, the material might be useful in an introduction paragraph.

Personal network

The next ring is the student's personal network. Besides thinking about things that happened to them, students should consider the experiences of people they know personally: family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers.

Perhaps students' acquaintances include people with relevant expertise or experience. Those may be people the writers could interview or survey.

Wider network

Sometimes a person's network includes people who can provide a reference to someone else who has the kind of information the writer needs. For example, perhaps a student's father knows a guy at work whose wife has relevant expertise.

Although school sometimes makes students think the only acceptable information sources are published sources, in many out-of-school situations people depend on their informal networks for a great proportion of their information.

Sometimes the quickest way to get information is by asking someone in person, by phone, or in an e-mail. In workplace situations, the best source may be the one you can reach most quickly.

Secondhand information

Students have a stock of information absorbed from TV, radio, books, magazines, and even from classroom instruction.

Often the knowledge students have from these impersonal, secondhand means is fragmentary or incorrect. They may have missed the first part of a broadcast, or perhaps they cannot recall the name of the book. However, what they do recall may be enough to jump-start research.

Published information

Although students should have some information to jump-start their research if their teachers are giving them authentic writing prompts, sometimes they don't have any evidence to start with. In those cases, they can

• Consult books and other printed sources.

• Search the Internet.

As part of thinking about where to find evidence, students must be taught to think about how long it will take to get the information. Sometimes the best information source is the one students can access most quickly.

The Internet is so widely used for information searches, that people sometimes overlook other sources that produce results quicker. A state-certified high school teacher told me she spent an hour online searching for the definition of vespers, which she could have found in 30 seconds in a dictionary.

See an example of how a student applies ripple strategy in preparing a five paragraph essay.

Click to see an example of what a student thinks while using ripple strategy to brainstorm material.