Five Paragraph Essays
blog.42floors.com
Five Paragraph Essays
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#2It's liberating and exciting when you learn there are tons of established structural patterns more interesting than five paragraph and you're expected to use and modify them.
Then you have to relearn the five paragraph essay for the GRE, and it's worse than the first time.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#3It's absolutely liberating to break free from the (very American) 5 paragraph essay; that's more of a learning tool, really. And you don't need to write a five paragraph essay on the GRE; I've consistently gotten 97% with my own versions, and I stopped writing in 5 paragraphs long ago. It's all about content, synthesis... The 5 paragraph is a start, but we should be taught to shed it when we're ready!
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#4It's liberating and exciting when you learn there are tons of established structural patterns more interesting than five paragraph and you're expected to use and modify them. Then you have to relearn the five paragraph essay for the GRE, and it's worse than the first time.
Pointers / links?
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#5It's absolutely liberating to break free from the (very American) 5 paragraph essay; that's more of a learning tool, really. And you don't need to write a five paragraph essay on the GRE; I've consistently gotten 97% with my own versions, and I stopped writing in 5 paragraphs long ago. It's all about content, synthesis... The 5 paragraph is a start, but we should be taught to shed it when we're ready!
Just to back you up in your throwaway point, I'm not from America, and had never heard of the five paragraph essay structure before.
This was not due to a lack of essay-writing during my education...
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#6It's absolutely liberating to break free from the (very American) 5 paragraph essay; that's more of a learning tool, really. And you don't need to write a five paragraph essay on the GRE; I've consistently gotten 97% with my own versions, and I stopped writing in 5 paragraphs long ago. It's all about content, synthesis... The 5 paragraph is a start, but we should be taught to shed it when we're ready!
It is taught for a reason though. Having some kind of introduction and thesis is important. Overly formulaic, etc it is, but understanding what it's supposed to be teaching is pretty important.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#7Writing is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Once the length of what I need to write exceeds around a hundred words, it's almost as if my brain stops working. I'm graduating from college this summer and looking back on it, I'd go so far as to argue papers were harder than thermodynamics midterms.
What I have going for me is that I'm a pretty good public speaker. The moment I picture myself behind a podium in front of an audience, ideas organize themselves into coherent patterns. It's a skill that's been honed over many weekends of debate practice.
My writing process now looks like this:
1. Identify thesis 2. Give a speech 3. Take bulleted notes 4. Give the speech again 5. Revise bulleted notes 6. If satisfied with structure begin expanding bullets into sentences and paragraphs.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#8It's absolutely liberating to break free from the (very American) 5 paragraph essay; that's more of a learning tool, really. And you don't need to write a five paragraph essay on the GRE; I've consistently gotten 97% with my own versions, and I stopped writing in 5 paragraphs long ago. It's all about content, synthesis... The 5 paragraph is a start, but we should be taught to shed it when we're ready!
It is taught for a reason though. Having some kind of introduction and thesis is important. Overly formulaic, etc it is, but understanding what it's supposed to be teaching is pretty important.
Totally. I wish that was just the start of the pedagogy, though... It my beginning comp classes (if I ever have enough time to start teaching again) I want to teach the five paragraph essay for two weeks, (simple) programming or technical writing as composition for another two weeks, and other forms of essay writing (ie. not getting to the final point until the end after a long, winding description, or a lyrical essay format).
As a side note, poets make great technical writers because they can be so economic with language. There is something to engage here.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#9> To become a better writer you have to stop writing and start speaking.
I loved it right up until that point.
The problem with the 5 paragraph essay, is that it's a rule-of-thumb. It's a good guide, but isn't necessarily appropriate.
People seem like they always want to prescribe 'the rule to follow to do x'. Their 'rule' ends up being a rule-of-thumb, and then smart people dissect its inadequacies. I think that's what you did, is you nicely dissected a stupid rule-of-thumb, but then prescribed an equally stupid one.
There are a lot of flaws in the structure of thought, and that definitely isn't an optimal way to write an essay. Personally, I like to diagram my argument out first (how the sub-arguments relate to each other, like a dependency tree).
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#10Writing is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Once the length of what I need to write exceeds around a hundred words, it's almost as if my brain stops working. I'm graduating from college this summer and looking back on it, I'd go so far as to argue papers were harder than thermodynamics midterms. What I have going for me is that I'm a pretty good public speaker. The moment I picture myself behind a podium in fro…
It sounds like you've got a solid form -- for the writing part, it's just annoying/tedious/takes time to start recording your thoughts as they go. Writing is a form of thinking, literally, and if you can train yourself to document your thoughts as you are saying or thinking them, it won't hurt as much, I promise! Your first draft should always be shit, and then you revise and rebuild, like you were already doing...