The five-paragraph essay isn't structured the way it is because that's a good structure, but because it's easy to write and grade quickly. The AP graders don't have time to read thousands of 5+ page essays with myriad layouts and structures.
Five Paragraph Essays
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Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#12If the 5-paragraph essay sounds bad, you should take a look at the French essay-writing style taught in schools and universities. In the first year or two of elite universities, the structure of the essay is often more important than the content.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#13> 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 w…
What makes you say it's equally stupid? Why don't you think it's optimal? I've never tried it before, and I'm curious how it works.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#14I would argue that structured writing with clear organization and simple diction is the most effective for informing people.
Books like Language Intelligence or manuals of technical writing delve into the topic fairly well. Watch championship extemporaneous speakers to see how to create an extended metaphor and build a structured progression of sources and analysis in a speech.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#15Uh. There's
the aphoristic style,
the "5-paragraph" style,
the dialogue,
the trialogue,
the research paper, etc.
A paper should be as simple as necessary, but no simpler. Depending on your topic, you could have 20 paragraphs, 10 paragraphs. And if what you're writing is arguably good, length shouldn't matter. At some point in your paper you should say, "I'm doing a damn fine job here, and my professor should love to read this."
If you cannot say that, that is a good indication that you should dump the paper. Not some rigid, lifeless arbitrary numeral. Numbers are not out to get you.
Our education system in the West has done a serious disservice to us by installing this idea that we should feel bad about making others read what we write.
It's bloody awful.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#16If the 5-paragraph essay sounds bad, you should take a look at the French essay-writing style taught in schools and universities. In the first year or two of elite universities, the structure of the essay is often more important than the content. http://bettizpod.over-blog.com/article-17353773.html
"The opinion" needs to have a multitude of expressions. Philosophical papers should be able to re-capitulate the point. If the opinion is expressed once and only in the introduction, that is a problem — it looks like a stroke of luck.
Look at Kant's Groundwork or Sidgwick's Method: you have an almost desperate attempt at finding just the right way and right context in which to normatively ground a proposition.
Look at Heideggar, look at Nietzsche. Even look at Orwell. The "opinion" is the "point", and the point has to be teased, flipped, tossed, rejected, restored, restated. A paper that makes its opinion in one statement is like a kid in class who accidentally blurts out the right answer.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#17Dictating the text is an extraordinary advice! I (still) didn't manage to build a decent blog, but I do write a lot. When I started to think about the text as if I were simply going through what I wanted to speak with someone, it was liberating.
On the other hand, though, I do understand the need to use the five paragraph structure (or, here in Brazil, the "three sections structure"). I, just as you, was usually pretty annoyed with these formulaic approaches to text, until I've had to re-learn all this essay writing stuff for my masters. In my college, professors and students are pretty close and debate is (really) stimulated, so I decided to throw my ramblings onto the writing professor (a very good writer, indeed). I used José Saramago (a portuguese Nobel prize winner that uses commas as periods, writes giant paragraphs, all the weird stuff) as my "strong" example, thinking it would shed the formalized structure argument to pieces and I would rise triumphantly from the talk with a Portuguese PhD specialized in text analysis. It didn't take me so long to realize why she had her PhD, and that her point of view was pretty convincing and, of course, well structured.
Kaboom! And I was illuminated. She agreed with each of my complaints. But then she proceeded to show me some texts from the beginning of the semester, comparing them with texts from the end of the semester. They were, in general, much clearer, concise, straight to the point - in one word, better. She argued that a course like that was intended to make people that do not write start to write something intelligible, comprehensible. It was not a course on creative writing. Therefore, the need for simplified rules and structures.
I do understand that this was the OP's whole point: upon reading his colleague's text, he judged it based on the rules he had learned. Then, when he talked to the other teacher, he realized that the main point of a text is to communicate something, irrespective of the number of paragraphs it has or the position of the goddamn thesis.
This rambling of mine is just to point to the other side: rules are important in some specific moments of the development of a proto-writer :)
That happens with all kinds of expressive, communicative actions we humans perform (in my opinion): photography, painting, music, poetry... All of them have some (or plenty of)rules. But these rules are not meant to be used as a "ruler" to judge if a work is good or bad, they are just a compass to guide the noobs :)
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#18I would argue that structured writing with clear organization and simple diction is the most effective for informing people. Books like Language Intelligence or manuals of technical writing delve into the topic fairly well. Watch championship extemporaneous speakers to see how to create an extended metaphor and build a structured progression of sources and analysis in a speech.
But a paper about King Lear is not in the business of "informing people". It's not informational, it's dialectical.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#19While I totally agree that the 5 paragraph essay format can be restrictive and is not suited for every situation, I think a good thesis statement in the first paragraph or two is frequently a good idea. Too often while reading posts online I often find that I'm most of the way through the post before I find out what point the author is trying to make. There are cases where keeping the actual point of the post or story is done as a way of adding suspense or gaining the reader's interest, it seems like most of the time the writers of posts like this are rambling or front-loading the piece to such a degree that it is off-putting and distracts from their message.
Re: Five Paragraph Essays
#20The best thing you can do to become a better writer is learn to edit. Once you've written something, anything, go back through and make it better. Pick apart the parts that seem clumsy and figure out ways to say the same thing. Don't be afraid to completely drop something you've said that you thought was particularly clever if it doesn't fit. Also don't be afraid to just completely rewrite a big chunk of stuff, use what you've written as notes and start rewriting. A good way to start is by trying to make things simpler and more direct. Think of it like refactoring for writing.