A couple of years ago, Brian Sztabnik published a post at the Talks with Teachers blog called “Let’s Bury the 5-Paragraph Essay”. It began by pointing out that the most popular posts at Edutopia that year had not been five paragraph essays. “Not a single one is five paragraphs. Not one has paragraph after paragraph with a topic sentence, supporting details, and a concluding sentence.” Instead, argued Sztabnik, they were “authentic”, and this, he proposed, provides a much better model for student writing. In response, Robert Sheppard wrote a post at the TESOL Blog, defending the genre and the exercise. It’s a perfectly cogent effort, and I agree with much of what he says, but he, too, did not write a five-paragraph essay. In this post, I want to take up Sztabnik’s implicit challenge and write a five-paragraph essay in defense of the five-paragraph essay. Like Sheppard, I want to argue that the genre does not preclude authenticity, nor stifle creativity. Moreover, the ability to compose oneself in five coherent paragraphs is a valuable skill that it is the responsibility of schools to teach and, indeed, to test.

Sztabnik’s concerns about the genre follow naturally from his concerns about standardized testing. “By its very definition,” he reminds us, “to standardize means to make something conform, to make homogenous. And since what gets tested gets taught, all originality, creativity, and authenticity has been sucked out of student writing to standardize it for an exam.” There is no question that the five-paragraph essay is a standard form and that if you’re going to test it you should teach it. But when we require a native Dane to write in English we are not demanding inauthenticity; we are offering them a new language in which to express themselves authentically.  By its very definition, we might say, prose demands conformity. But to demand that students express themselves in an essay is not to demand they stop being themselves. They are to be themselves in a particular way under particular conditions, that is all. It is difficult to be yourself while mastering a complex body of knowledge about literature, history, society, or cosmology. Coherent prose, we might say, simply helps us to overcome this difficulty without “losing ourselves” in the details.

By a similar token, when we teach music students the arpeggios needed to play the prelude in C major of the Well-Tempered Clavier we are not destroying their creativity. Rather, we are inviting them to experience a way of doing something that achieves a particular range of effects; we are giving them new skills to express real emotions. With those skills in (as it were) hand, they can be as creative or uncreative as they like. Being skilled does not make it more difficult for them to express their creativity, it only makes it easier to accomplish particular creative goals. Do we imagine that developing the skills of drawing hands and faces somehow stifles the creativity of the artist? Do we imagine that the painter is hindered by understanding how paints can be combined to produce particular colors, and colors to produce effects like the play of light on the surface of a lake? Likewise, to teach someone to compose a coherent paragraph, and then a series of them to produce a compelling argument, is not a way of restricting a creative impulse. It’s range of things we can do with such an impulse.

The five-paragraph essay, I will insist, demonstrates a valuable skill. The genre is useful in itself for the organization of short presentations or the individual parts of longer ones. It is entirely possible to write a full journal article as a series of five-paragraph essays, at least as a first approximation. Once the five-paragraph version of an argument, or part of an argument, exists, the writer, having invested a measured amount of effort so far, can decide whether further efforts to produce a more “interesting” version is needed. (Note that I do not say a more “authentic” or more “creative” version. The writer may have been as a authentic and creative as can be within the allotted time and space.) Often, a series of good, clear paragraphs is all that the occasion demands. Each will have set down what the writer believes along with the grounds on which the reader, too, should believe such things. Each paragraph will have supported, elaborated or defended a well-defined claim, affording the reader an opportunity to engage with that claim and demonstrate its rightness or wrongness. It makes the conversation of scholarship among learned people possible. It makes learning possible. Students who learn how to represent everything they know in coherent prose paragraphs will not regret the time spent developing that ability.

We can all agree that it is the responsibility of schools to teach and to test the skills students need to become knowledgeable people. Knowledgeable people, when faced with a situation that falls within their domain of knowledge, are able to make up their minds efficiently and accurately about what is going on. They are able to converse intelligently about their reasons to think one thing or another about a particular matter. And they are able to write these thoughts and those reasons down in such a way that other knowledgeable people can help them think even more effectively about the question. The five-paragraph essay demands that students organize their thoughts in a way that opens them to reasoned critique by other thinkers, similarly organized, and, as I have argued here, there’s no reason to think that these cannot be entirely authentic and creative thoughts. In order to “conform”, the students must make decisions about what to say and discover their basis for saying so. And they must then present these decisions in clear and coherent prose. In short,  the five-paragraph essay represents the very skills that it is the responsibility of schools to teach and to test.

I attended the annual symposium of the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Internationalisation and Parallel Language use (CIP), which, as always, gave me a lot to think about. There was an interesting presentation about the importance of feedback, for example, which led to a no less interesting discussion. Nina Nellemann Rasmussen and Janus Mortensen had done a survey of their writing students which found, not surprisingly, that students found it generally useful to get feedback and more useful to get feedback from their teachers than from their fellow students. Someone asked the very relevant question of whether this showed in the students’ work, or whether this was just a matter of the students’ perceptions. The study had indeed only measured the students’ own perceptions of the utility of the feedback.

This led me to propose that we imagine a large-scale randomized controlled trial. Suppose we take a cohort of 600 students and divide them randomly into three groups (A, B, C). All three are given the same lectures and the same final essay exam. All three groups are given a pre-test to set a baseline against which to measure improvement, and are given deadlines to submit work throughout the semester, but while one group (A, the control) is merely given a pass/fail on the submitted text, the other two are given feedback. In group B, the students have to give each other feedback, while in group C they receive feedback from the teacher. After the final grades are given, the final test is compared with the pre-test and are evaluated for signs of improvement. The question is, in which group will we expect to see most improvement?

I think group C will marginally outperform group B, but B and C will significantly outperform group A. It’s possible that four groups would be needed to test whether giving feedback itself improves performance. (This raises the possibility that group B would outperform group C because the act of giving feedback is actually worth more than receiving “qualified” feedback from a teacher.)

In other words, I believe feedback is important. But I’m actually not so sure that it has to be very “expensive”, i.e., that it has to be provided by teachers. I do think students value teacher feedback more than peer feedback. But I guess I’m saying I think this may be an overly generous valuation. Even if it is worth a bit more to the student (in terms of actual improvement) it may not be worth the cost of the teacher’s time given to all the students. 80% of the value, perhaps, can be provided by peers.

I actually think the point goes deeper. I deliberately gave group A submission deadlines that are not strictly necessary (since they are neither getting nor receiving feedback) in order to remove the confounder that the regular writing practice implies. (If one difference between group A and the other two is that B and C wrote more during the semester, the comparison won’t tell us anything.) Another 80% (of the improvement independent of giving feedback), I suspect, comes simply from practicing. Finally, I think a substantial proportion of the improvement can also be predicted from characteristics of the students themselves (though this would ideally have been controlled for by randomization).  This leaves writing instructors with the following somewhat unhappy hierarchy of what improvement in writing depends on:

1. Character
2. Practice
3. Feedback
4. Instruction

In other words, I think we might be spending too much time trying to figure out what to tell the students about writing, not enough effort figuring out ways of getting them to write and seek feedback from their peers. Instruction should be organized around these student-based activities. The efforts of instructors are wasted if the students are not writing a great deal and devoting time to reading each other’s work. We have to remember that writing instruction is ultimately a species of coaching. It’s not what you tell the students that matters but what you can get the students to do.

Sometimes a draft gets longer than we’d like. Sometimes we are asked for a text that is shorter than the one we’re working on. We’re writing a paper for a journal with an 8000-word limit and before we know it we’ve written ten-thousand words. Then we’re suddenly asked to submit an extended abstract on the same subject with a 1500-word limit. The problem, we tell ourselves, is to “reduce” what we’ve got to something shorter. I want to offer an argument against this way of thinking.

Remember that a text is a series of paragraphs of at least six sentences and at most 200 words that say one thing and support, elaborate or defend it. When planning or re-organizing a text, you should always use a key-sentence outline as your guide. That is, you should take the one sentence in each paragraph that states what the rest of the sentences merely support, elaborate or defend and copy it into a separate document. If you’ve got a 40-paragraph paper you’ll have 40 sentences in your key-sentence outline. These sentences should always make sense in sequence without the context of the paragraphs in which they will ultimately appear. A good paper will be a series of claims that indicate an argument independent of the basis you are providing for each claim.

Now, each paragraph will consist of between 100 and 200 words. A first draft of a paper with an 8000-word limit should consist of about 40 paragraphs, i.e., between 4000 and 8000 words altogether, which should leave you with plenty of space to add more paragraphs as needed in revision. Always think of the revision process as identifying (1) new paragraphs that need to be written, (2) existing paragraphs that need to be removed or (3) existing paragraphs that need to be rewritten. There’s nothing else that can be wrong with your paper.

When trying to imagine a shorter version of longer paper, don’t imagine that the task is to “reduce” the bigger text to a smaller one. Don’t think of the job as removing words and sentences from the paper you have already written. Think of it as imagining a new text that makes fewer claims. You may have a 60-paragraph paper that is 9000 words long. Okay, imagine a 40-paragraph version of the same argument. You need to find 20 sentences in your key-sentence outline that you can do away with, perhaps while modifying some of the others. If you’ve got reasonably uniform paragraph lengths, you’ve just imagined a 6000 word paper. But don’t think you’ll arrive at this paper simply by “boiling” or “pruning” the longer text. That’s not how it works. Instead, write the new text following the new outline. It will take you 20 hours.

Or imagine “reducing” the text to a 1500 word extended abstract. You’ll now have to make do with 10 paragraphs at best. (I actually recommend dividing the word limit by 200, which will force you to write even more economically than necessary at first pass. You will probably then have room for an extra paragraph or two at the end.) What are the ten (or eight) things you want to say? Imagine a paper that says them. Then write it. It will take 5 hours, 27 minutes (of writing) + 3 minutes (for a break) at a time.

That is, I’m urging you not to think of your longer draft as setting a material constraint on your shorter one. The challenge is not one of representing a existing longer text in an imagined shorter text that leaves something out. Rather, the longer text was an attempt to represent what you know about something in 8,000 words, or 10,000 words, or whatever. But there’s no ideal amount of words to represent a body of knowledge. If you had 20,000 words you could do it even more justice. But that doesn’t mean that the 10,000-word text is somehow a deficient or “reduced” version of the “ideal” longer one. (The truly ideal text would, I guess, have no word limit at all? It would be infinitely long?) Rather, the enormous surplus of knowledge that the longer text demonstrates you have is a material resource for producing a different, shorter text.

You just have to represent that knowledge within the space of fewer paragraphs. In the main, think of a “shorter” text not in terms of the amount words but the amount of paragraphs. Don’t try remove words and sentences (except for the usual reason of keeping each paragraph below 200 words). Remove whole claims, i.e., key sentences, i.e., entire paragraphs. That said, I understand, for some purposes, imagining a text with shorter paragraphs. Sometimes, especially in an abstract or a conference paper, it can be useful to define the paragraph as consisting of least 4 sentences and at most 150 words. This gives you at least 10 paragraphs for a 1500 word text, which may make it easier to decide what to say. It may also bring the style more into line with the kind of text you are trying to write–more a synopsis of an argument than the argument itself.

But my point still holds: don’t try to reduce a longer text to a shorter one. Outline a new text with fewer claims. Then write the best possible paragraphs to support each one. You’re not boiling anything down. You’re not pruning branches off a tree. You’re not weeding a garden. You’re not forcing anything into a form. You are doing what you always do when you write, namely, making series of claims, one paragraph at a time. Your word limit tells you only how many things you can say. Saying them well is the same old problem of writing, the familiar difficulty.

There’s been a lot of great discussion over at Andrew Gelman’s blog in the wake of Susan Dominus’s piece in the NYTimes about Amy Cuddy and power posing. I wrote about it here when the story broke, and Andrew has since published a number of posts about criticism in science (see this one and this one in particular). It reminded me of a post I wrote six years ago while reading Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which I want to re-purpose for this blog today.

Lewis’s book is about the Wall Street outsiders and oddballs who “shorted” (i.e., bet against) the subprime mortgage market and made a killing when it finally collapsed. Interestingly, after they had decided that the market was going to collapse, it was not, actually, a straightforward matter to bet against it. Had they thought that a company was going to go bust, there’d be a standard way of making money on that belief: they could borrow stock in the company, sell it, and then wait for its share price to crash. At that point, they buy back the shares (cheap) and pay off their debt. But, as Lewis points out, things were very different with mortgage bonds:

To sell a stock or bond short you need to borrow it, and [the bonds they were interested in] were tiny and impossible to find. You could buy them or not buy them but you couldn’t bet explicitly against them; the market for subprime mortages simply had no place for people in it who took a dim view of them. You might know with certainty that the entire mortgage bond market was doomed, but you could do nothing about it. (29)

I had a shock of recognition when I read that. Back in those days, I was working very hard to find a way to “bet against” a number of stories that have been told in the organization studies literature. I have now somewhat resigned myself to the fact that there’s no place in that literature for people who take a dim view of them. While some people say encouraging things to me in person about what I do, there isn’t really a genre (in the area of management studies) of papers that only points out errors in other people’s work. You have to make a “contribution” too. In a sense, you can buy the stories people are telling you or not buy them but you can’t explicitly criticize them.

Back then, I thought about this in terms of the difference between faith and knowledge. Knowledge is a belief held in a critical environment, while faith is a belief held in an “evangelical” environment. The mortgage bond market was an evangelical environment in which to hold beliefs about housing prices, default rates, and credit ratings on CDOs. There was no simple way to critique the “good news”. So it took some dedicated outsiders to see what was really going on. These were people who insisted on looking at the basis of the mortgage bonds that were being pooled and traded on Wall Street in increasingly exotic ways.

One of these guys was Steve Eisman, who was a notoriously cantankerous personality. (He was fictionalized brilliantly by Steve Carell in the movie.) He recalls meeting Ken Lewis, the CEO of Bank of America. “[The CEO’s on Wall Street] didn’t know their own balance sheet … I was sitting there listening to [Ken Lewis]. I had an epiphany. I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, he’s dumb!’ A lightbulb went off. The guy running one of the biggest banks in the world is dumb” (TBS, p. 174). Yes, or perhaps he was just working in an evangelical rather than critical environment. Here, “any old balance sheet” will do … as long as you think it’s bringing good news.

I think, sadly, the same thing can be said about various corners of the social sciences today. Amy Cuddy’s work is being defended by many as “good news”, and there is little room in the mainstream literature to publish critiques (and replications with null results) that suggest that power posing does not have the effect it claims to have. As in the case of the housing bubble, these things can be more easily discussed now that there actually is a crisis, but we mustn’t forget the incredible amount of hard work that was done by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, Lief Nelson, Andrew Gelman and others to reach this point. It was and still is a somewhat thankless task and, unlike Burry and Eisman, they don’t stand to make a billion dollars on their bet. Fortunately, the work of the Amy Cuddys and Brian Wansinks of the world isn’t likely to bring the global economy to its knees either.

It is sad, however, that so many social scientists take such a dim view criticism. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard–who was, incidentally, born in the year of a financial crisis–raised the question of the sense in which sin is simply ignorance. If so, he asked, is it

the  state of  someone  who  has  not  known  and  up  until  now  has  not been  capable  of  knowing  anything  about  truth,  or  is  it  a  resultant,  a  later ignorance? If it is the latter, then sin must essentially lodge somewhere else than in ignorance. It must lodge in a person’s efforts to obscure his knowing. (The Sickness Unto Death)

Dominus tells the story of Amy Cuddy as someone who was following all the rules until the rules suddenly changed. That may be partly true. But a lot of the problems in the social sciences today, and the reason that they have gathered themselves into something like a full blown crisis, is, I fear, that people have been making a real effort to obscure their knowing, as Kierkegaard put it. Or perhaps they’re just not, as Andrew somewhat charitably suggests, making the effort to do something difficult (statistics, scholarship) well.  I hope that the social sciences will stop taking such a dim view of criticism going forward and give more space in the literature to people who take a dim view of underpowered studies with overblown publicity. Kierkegaard’s works are traditionally divided into “edifying” and “existential” discourses. Perhaps all of us need to be both evangelists of science and critics of it? Perhaps we need to be evangelists for criticism?

If you haven’t already done so, I strongly recommend you read Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner’s Clear and Simple as the Truth. In many ways, my approach to academic writing is a training regimen in the “classic style”. What I call the Writing Moment, in particular, embodies a core principle of this style, namely, that thought precedes speech. As Thomas and Turner point out, this principle runs counter to what a great many people have been taught (and go on to teach) about the role of writing in inquiry. Thomas and Turner do a good job of describing this influential and somewhat pernicious doctrine:

Records are understood as a sort of external memory, and memory as internal records. Writing is thinking on paper, and thought is writing in the mind. The author’s mind is an endless paper on which he writes, making mind internal writing; and the book he writes is external mind, the external form of that writing. The author is the self thinking. The self is the author writing the mind. (59)

Like Thomas and Turner, I caution against this view of yourself (your self) as a writer. They describe the alternative in compelling terms:

Thinking is not writing; even more important, writing is not thinking. This does not mean that in classic style all of the thinking precedes all of the writing, but rather that the classic writer does not write as he is thinking something out and does not think by writing something out. Between the period of one sentence and the beginning of the next, there is space for the flash of a perfect thought, which is all the classic writer needs. (59-60)

Notice that this space is one that the reader’s mind can occupy as well the writer’s. Indeed, that’s the whole point of the writing, to instantiate in the reader’s mind the “flash” of what Descartes (the patron saint of classic style) called a “clear and distinct idea”, a “perfect thought”. Classic writers don’t make a big deal of their imperfections; they know that their own thoughts, and those of their readers, are often less perfect than they would like, but they don’t show this in their writing. Instead, they do the best they can to present only ideas that they have thought through, as clearly and truthfully as they can. Simply put, they try to say only things they know are true in their writing, and they make sure that their text leaves this space for real thought to flash before the reader.

If you want to train this ability–which is, you’ll notice, as much a training of your mind (to think) as your hands (to write)–I recommend trying my rules for a few weeks. End the day with a clear and distinct idea of what you’ll write in the morning. Articulate a thought in a key sentence and relax for the rest of the evening. Then, in the morning, spend 27 minutes composing that thought into at least six sentences and at most 200 words that present it to an intellectual peer. Imagine your reader’s mind to be as spacious and brilliant as yours.

This will not just make you a better writer. By uncluttering your mind of the multiple “drafts” of your “internal writing” and distilling it, if only for a moment, into an actual thought–one that can live independent of your text–you are strengthening a mental faculty that too many of us neglect. You are learning to put the writing where it belongs: on the surface. This will free you to explore the depths of your own mind. And that, friends, is where the truth is ultimately found.