One of the first things an apprentice woodworker learns is how to make a box. The ability to join five pieces of wood together along their edges to form a continuous surface that can hold a certain volume is useful in all sorts of other applications. For example, many tables are made by connecting the legs, not directly to the tabletop, but to a box apron underneath it, which both gives the legs greater stability and prevents the top from groaning under a load. A bookcase is an upright box, divided by shelves, and the base is usually just another box orthogonal to the first. You get the idea: a cabinetmaker who can’t build a box isn’t much of one. But being able to build a box isn’t the end of the story either. You have to know how to put boxes together and how to add all manner of practical and decorative features to them.

In a new volume edited by Nigel Caplan and Ann Johns, the five-paragraph essay is defined as “an approach to writing that is insensitive to context, rhetorical situation, audience, or communicative purpose” and which “presents a single, prescriptive, and specific form for all student writing.” John Warner frames his opposition to the form in similar terms, insisting that it’s not the form as such that there’s anything wrong with but its universal application to all writing tasks in the academic environment. This characterization of the five-paragraph essay has always puzzled me, I must say, since I can’t imagine why any teacher would think that a single, specific form could be used for all the writing that students do. Nor can I imagine how a student can come to think that the constraints of one particular assignment would apply to all other assignments. But Caplan, Johns and Warner are closer to the action (in the US) than I am (in Denmark) so I will take their word that this view is widely held. As such, I’m here to help them oppose it.

William Carlos Williams told us to think of a poem sometimes as a “machine made of words” and sometimes as a “field of action”. Putting it in these terms, when the master tells the apprentice to join five pieces of wood to make a box, a rich field of action opens up. A box is a machine made of wood, a thing for holding other things. There are many decisions to be made, some of which the master may make for the apprentice to focus attention on particular difficulties to be overcome, particular “learning outcomes”, to use today’s terminology.  The master may specify which pieces of wood to use, or how big the box must be. The apprentice may be asked to make one with a lid or to get the job done in under an hour. The master may likewise leave the choice of materials, the box’s dimensions, and the timeframe open, specifying only a function. “Build the ideal box to store dry rice in the kitchen,” for example. The apprentice will now have to learn something about rice and perhaps what happens in a kitchen. It is the master’s job to set up a situation, a purpose, an end-user — a field of action — within which the student can learn something.

Ezra Pound taught Rosmarie Waldrop to think of the prose poem (a lyrical paragraph) as “a center around which, not a box within which.” She called the relevant field of action “the lawn of excluded middle”, a place where contradictions can meet and work things out, like children playing in front of the house. An academic paragraph may not be as much fun, but the idea is the same. In a paragraph we play the truth and the meaning of words off each other in the reader’s imagination, hoping that by the end they get at least our meaning, and hopefully our truth. There is no one particular right way to do this, no universal prescription that can get the job done. “[T]he four points of the compass are equal on the lawn of excluded middle,” Waldrop says, “where full maturity of meaning takes time the way you eat a fish, morsel by morsel, off the bone.” This is where language happens.

To me, the five-paragraph essay is merely one place that writing can take place. It should never be presented to students as a universal norm for all writing, not even for all the writing they will do at school. But its unit of composition is, let’s say, widely applicable. It is rare that they will not be able to approach their task as the construction and arrangement of paragraphs, just as a piece of furniture can often be approached, at least as a first approximation, as an organization of boxes. By reducing the students’ range of rhetorical choices (by making a number of decisions for them) we can draw their attention to the potential of particular ways of putting words together, particular sentence structures, particular dispositions of the paragraph. One day, the student may find a way to accomplish a writing goal without writing a single coherent paragraph, just as the apprentice may build a bookcase without a single box. “Sometimes a bookcase is not a box within which, but a line along which,” they might say. But to have gained mastery of a basic form is not an obstacle to their work. It is the center of their strength.

Nigel Caplan and Ann Johns have just published a book that proposes to “debunk” the five-paragraph essay. As usual, this sort of rhetoric gets my back up. I use both the letter and the spirit of the five-paragraph essay in my own coaching and teaching, not, of course, as the end-all and be-all of writing, but as a good clear place to begin, a simple machine, like a lever or an inclined plane in physics, a scale or chord progression in music, a model or color study in art class. Whenever someone sets out to debunk it — or, worse, to “kill” it — I feel a bit defensive, perhaps protective. I want to spend a post or two outlining my reaction.

John Warner emphasizes that the five-paragraph essay is not so much a “cause” as an “avatar” of bad writing. “By itself, the five-paragraph essay isn’t necessarily a problem,” he tells us; the issues arise in the way it is used in the classroom and, especially, in assessment. Caplan and Johns are also more concerned with the use of the form than the form itself:

We want to be clear from the outset that the number of paragraphs is unimportant: What defines the five-paragraph essay is not the magical trinity of body paragraphs but rather an approach to writing that is insensitive to context, rhetorical situation, audience, or communicative purpose. Instead, the “five-paragraph essay” presents a single, prescriptive, and specific form for all student writing. (P. v)

On this point, I can of course agree. I would never defend “an approach to writing that is insensitive to context, rhetorical situation, audience, or communicative purpose”. Indeed, I use the five-paragraph essay and variations on that form to get students and scholars to think about things like context, situation, audience and purpose, as well as their own epistemic basis for saying what they want to say. What then is pitting me against Warner, Caplan and Johns? What battle have I enlisted in? What history am I on the wrong side of? I want to get the bottom of this.

This blog is called Inframethodology, which is intended to evoke “the underlying craft of research”. Having been trained as a social epistemologist, I’ve long been interested in the social and material conditions of knowledge production. This means understanding the complex relationship between the product and the process of research. So I am very sensitive to the way a form, like the five-paragraph essay, can be institutionalized and placed in the service of darker forces than it was originally designed to serve. In fact, I am reminded of a very apposite observation that Ezra Pound made in his ABC of Reading:

It is hard to tell whether music has suffered more by being taught than has verse-writing from having no teachers. Music in the past century of shame and human degradation slumped in large quantities down into a soggy mass of tone.

In general we may say that the deliquescence of instruction in any art proceeds in this manner.

I. A master invents a gadget, or procedure to perform a particular function, or a limited set of functions.

Pupils adopt the gadget. Most of them use it less skilfully than the master. The next genius may improve it, or he may cast it aside for something more suited to his own aims.

II. Then comes the paste-headed pedagogue or theorist and proclaims the gadget a law, or rule.

III. Then a bureaucracy is endowed, and the pin-headed secretariat attacks every new genius and every form of inventiveness for not obeying the law, and for perceiving something the secretariat does not. (P. 200)

I think Warner, Caplan and Johns would grant that the essay (a composition of n paragraphs) is an apt gadget for a limited function. The invention of the paragraph and ways of arranging several paragraphs to indicate a larger argument is not, in itself, the problem here. Nor, I would imagine, is the introduction-body-conclusion form worthless in the presentation of one’s ideas. The problems arise in stage II and III, when the gadget is turned into a rule and the rule is enforced by punishing those who do things differently, without regard for how effectively they might be accomplishing their goals. Their issue is not with the gadget, but with the pedagogue and the secretariat. I am not without sympathies for their position here.

But Pound also says this:

It doesn’t matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

Mediocre poetry is in the long run the same in all countries. The decadence of Petrarchism in Italy and the ‘rice powder poetry’ in China arrive at about the same level of weakness despite the difference in idiom. (P. 62)

If I understand the complaint of those who would do away with the five-paragraph essay, it is twofold. First, students are not rewarded for writing essays “that stand up solidly” if they did not arrange the paragraphs in the right order. Second, students are rewarded for writing mediocre, wobbly essays so long as they do conform to the rules of the 5PE. I can only join them in their condemnation of whatever secretariat insists on this system of incentives. Indeed, when George Orwell set out his rules for writing he was right to include this one: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” It’s something I tell my students to do as well when I give them a 5 or 11 or 40 or 120 paragraph outline to work with. Following my rules can never be an excuse for writing badly. Nor should good writing be punished merely for breaking one.

And yet there is that table. It has four legs and a top. The length of the legs, both in absolute terms and in relation to each other, matters. The student must learn to turn each of them on the lathe in the same style, following the same pattern. The wood must be chosen with care. The top must be thick enough to support a load over its span and reinforced with a box apron. The corners must be rounded, the surface sanded and finished. All of this must be done with the purpose of the table and the desires of its end user in mind. The apprentice can make hundreds of tables, or legs or tops or aprons, with no purpose other than practicing the craft (or satisfying the master), learning how to turn, join and finish pieces of wood. Telling them that a table has four legs and a top and should stand up solidly under a load is not going to undermine their talent. Indeed, in academia, it represents the basic form of the craft beneath our methods.

Academics don’t just write. In addition to their core research and teaching tasks, academics participate in a wide range of public and specialist forums, where they bring their knowledge and experience to the table. Some of these activities can have profound effects on their careers. Becoming a policy adviser to the government or holding a popular TED talk imbues a scholar with significant authority, giving a different weight to their subsequent work. Some academics, and their institutions, are devoting significant resources to producing podcasts that engage the public in their research. As a result, the identities of academics are now less tied to their “literacy” as traditionally understood, their qualification to speak on particular subjects now being established in other media. Still, writing is an important part of what they do and we must not lose sight of the essential role it plays in the competence of the scholar.

I was talking to a colleague about this yesterday after he had finished recording for a podcast. His producer had him answer questions, producing an hour or two of material. This material would then be edited down to some number of 20-minute podcasts, leaving false starts, needless digressions, and even the questions on the cutting room floor. The result would be a coherent stream of thought with a nice, “improvised” feel to it. As a writing instructor, I suddenly felt a little threatened. After all, many people consume “writing” in the form of audio books. If the “text” itself could now be produced relatively efficiently, simply by editing extemporaneous speech into a unified statement, what need would there be to actually mark up a page? Could speaking and cutting replace writing and editing as a way to express our thoughts in academic contexts?

My colleague reminded me that a written text has a number of advantages for the reader in an academic setting. Often we are reading “critically”, i.e., testing the coherence of an argument. That makes it very useful to be able to flip back and forth between pages, and to leave notes in the margin, referring back to earlier statements. It is correspondingly much easier to construct a text that can survive critical reading by writing it down, using the page as a “space” in which to “lay out” our ideas. It lets the ideas stand in a simultaneous relationship to each other, a timeless one, which is what logic requires. An academic text isn’t just a series of claims made one after another; it is a structure of claims that bear on each other. An academic text is not just a literary performance that might just as well be read aloud by an actor. It is a literal representation of our ideas. The words on the page stand for beliefs we hold to be true. Our text opens our views to critical engagement from our peers.

But what is it about writing that affords us an occasion for criticism? Why do we trust people more when they put their ideas in writing and publish them? Why don’t we just learn everything from podcasts, and audio books, and YouTube lectures? At the end of the day, I believe it is because writing is the most efficient way of presenting propositional content, specifically, to make statements of fact. In other media, our concern is to hold our reader’s attention, while in writing we are free to imagine that our reader, at least for the duration of a paragraph (about one minute) had freely given us their attention. Under these conditions, under the presumption of attention, if you will, we can choose to present the most intellectually relevant details. When writing a paragraph, we have the negative problem of not losing our reader’s attention rather than the positive problem of catching it. I am reminded that Steve Fuller sometimes ribs academics about their predilection for — even their addiction to — captive audiences (beginning with students, progressing to colleagues). But is this really something to be embarrassed about? Surely there can be a region of the discourse that is reserved for people who are ready to listen and willing to make an effort? The sort of writing that is done there will have particular qualities. It’s not all that writing can do, but this “academic purpose” is surely noble in itself?