pace John Warner

The five-paragraph essay isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Many writers find the form constricting and many teachers are unhappy with the results their students deliver when they try to conform to it. But suppose you absolutely did have to write one, and suppose you wanted to do more than a passable job. How would you go about it? And how would you make sure that it developed your writing chops at the same time? That’s what I’m going to try to explain in this post. Building on my previous post, I’ll show you how to use key-sentences to outline your essay. I’ll also explain how to distinguish your paragraphs from each other by means of their content and, ultimately, how to bring them together to make a single, coherent rhetorical gesture. My aim is to persuade you that, for all its artifice, the five-paragraph essay is a perfectly good occasion to work on your style.

Since every paragraph says exactly one thing, a five-paragraph essay will say five things. Each of these claims will be articulated in a simple, declarative sentence, which we call the “key sentence”. The trick to outlining your essay is to make sure that a simple list of your five key sentences immediately evokes an argument, albeit a somewhat schematic one. For example, this post can be outlined as follows:

1. This post explains how to write a five-paragraph essay.
2. Use your key-sentences as an outline.
3. Distinguish your paragraphs by means of their content.
4. Bring them together in a single, coherent rhetorical gesture.
5. In this way, the five-paragraph essay becomes a meaningful exercise in style.

This outlining exercise can bring its own rewards. It can be enjoyable to observe your argument at a certain distance — a level of abstraction, if you will — without having to decide whether it has been executed properly. Looking at the whole can give you a sense of what you might accomplish, if only you do a good enough job on the parts. Of course, if already your outline bores you, you should sharpen some of your points, or give the whole thing a larger aim. It’s good to do this before you put too much work into your prose. It’s good for your style to write with a sense of purpose.

It’s too easy to distinguish your paragraphs by their function (or location) in your essay. It’s much better to think of your introduction, your three body paragraphs, and your conclusion as being about different things. The introduction, for example, will be about the essay itself. Each of the body paragraphs will about different aspects or facets of your topic. The conclusion, meanwhile, will be about that topic itself and, therefore, about the intellectual context that makes it meaningful, or valuable. So, for example, my first paragraph situates my essay within a controversy about writing pedagogy. Each of the body paragraphs are about different aspects of a five-paragraph essay, which is an object that exists in the world (if not often, as some critics point out, “in the wild”). The conclusion, when we get to it, will assert the value of the object that the body paragraphs have detailed, it will go beyond the conversation about academic writing to indicate how strong prose makes the world a better place. Being clear about your content will let you bring your style more precisely to bear upon it.

Structure both separates and connects. For example, you may already have noticed that in each paragraph I make a point of mentioning “style”. This will become important in my last paragraph because I want to emphasize that even highly formalized, very artificial work can give you an occasion to develop a unique and powerful style, for use beyond the essay form, and beyond academia altogether. Whatever your subject, when writing a five-paragraph essay, you want to make sure that there’s a thread, or theme, that runs through the entire text — a line along which the reader’s attention moves towards your conclusion. Though the reader should feel like you’re touching down firmly on each separate point (one for each body paragraph), there should also be a sense of moving forward, of making progress. The points should be adding up in some register somewhere in the mind of the reader, perhaps not quite consciously, but enough that the conclusion will seem natural when you get there. This structural through-line is what lets you enjoy the play of language from sentence to sentence. Knowing it’s there, you can add some texture, some style.

The five-paragraph essay is, first and foremost, an exercise — a structured writing activity that puts your prose through its paces. It should take about three hours to write and about five minutes to read. It is often a good way to get your ideas in order, and, with the right kind of reader, it can be an efficient way of communicating those ideas. In the first paragraph the reader is told where you are and what you’ve got on your mind. In the next three paragraphs you carefully unpack your reasoning. And in the final paragraph you reassert your overall thesis and emphasize its importance. The life of the polity depends on our capacity for deliberation, our ability to consider ideas in a calm and orderly way. Writing a five-paragraph essay on a regular basis will get your prose into shape, working on your style from the center of your strength. Your community needs you to be strong.

Let’s begin with what a paragraph is. In an academic setting, a paragraph is usually a composition of at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that says one thing and supports, elaborates or defends it. That’s a rule of thumb and it doesn’t mind being broken now and then. (The rule not the thumb.) And it may be adjusted for different disciplines. There are areas of scholarship where paragraphs are generally shorter than that, and even some where they are longer, but for most purposes, in most of the humanities and social sciences, approaching the paragraph on these terms will work. Certainly, if you are able to compose paragraphs like this, you are able to do a great many other things, including writing somewhat longer or shorter ones. The important thing is that each paragraph has a single, well-defined point, a deliberate rhetorical posture, and a finite volume. If you need an example, this is the last sentence of the first paragraph in this post.

The first order of business is to decide what you want your paragraph to say. This is best done by working out a “key sentence” that neatly summarizes what the paragraph is about. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence of the paragraph, though it often is; it just has to somehow stand out as the sentence that makes your point. It will usually be a simple, declarative sentence that states your meaning plainly and directly. Obviously, this sentence can be revised as you work on the paragraph, but you want to have a version of it in front of you when you begin. It should say something you know well enough to write a whole paragraph about. It should never express everything you know about the subject; it shouldn’t exhaust your knowledge. It should have the dignity of an iceberg, as Hemingway puts it. When you look at it, you should be aware of all the knowledge that you have waiting under the surface.

I recommend you decide on the key sentence the day before you write the paragraph. At the end of the day, when you have decided that you’re not going to learn anything new, that you’re not going to get any smarter, take five minutes to call to mind something you know to be true. Write it down in the form of a good, strong sentence and take a quick moment to gauge its weight. How does it feel to you? Is it a point you’d struggle to support, elaborate or defend in the company of one of your peers? Would you have a hard time providing evidence, explaining your meaning, or dealing with objections? Or is it comfortably part of what you know? If you feel confident about it then resolve to write a paragraph about it in the morning, to exercise that confidence in writing. Pick a specific time and place to do it and then — and this is very important — put it out of your mind until that moment arrives.

The next day, sit down at the appointed time, in the appointed place, and type out the key sentence you wrote last night. Now, think of your reader (a peer in your discipline or a student in your class). What difficulty does the key sentence pose for your reader? Will your reader find it hard to believe, hard to understand, or hard to agree with? I recommend you keep it simple; confine yourself to a single difficulty and spend the entire paragraph supporting your point (if your reader finds it hard to believe), elaborating it (if your reader finds it hard to understand) or defending it (if your reader finds it hard to agree). It is possible to shift your posture in mid-paragraph, but this is, let’s say, an “advanced” skill. Get the basics down and then move on to harder, more complex, problems, or even “the fourth difficulty”: boredom. In this post, I have limited myself entirely to explaining what I mean.* In others, you will find I engage with readers who disagree with me or find what I say hard to believe or fail to see why I’m so excited about all of this.

This is both an exercise and a practice. You can get through much of the writing you need to do for your school or research career by writing paragraphs as deliberately as I’ve here suggested. But working in this way will help especially when you’re trying to improve your writing. It will make your difficulty as a writer explicit and it will bring the resources you can bring to bear on the problem into view. Give yourself 18 or 27 minutes to write each paragraph. Notice that this gives you 18 or 27 times longer to write the paragraph than your reader is likely to have to read it. (It takes about one minute to read 200 words. It should have taken you about five minutes to read this post.) Spend the first two or three minutes on your key sentence, then spend about ten minutes composing additional sentences. Then spend five or ten minutes making the sentences as clear and concise as possible. Then read the paragraph out loud and spend the remainder of your time fixing whatever that showed you needed fixing. Then stop. Every time you compose a paragraph like this you will become just a little better at writing.

_________
*Update (25.11.21): Rereading this post, I wonder if that is entirely right. The opening paragraph for example: does it really only elaborate my meaning? Is there not something, if you will, defensive about it?

I’ve been writing a number of posts recently about students and I thought I’d better write at least one addressed to them. So … Hello, students, I hope you’ve gotten the school year off to a good start!

The other day, one of you came to see me in my office to talk about your writing. “It’s my greatest weakness,” you said. “I have no trouble speaking in front people, but…” I think I may have interrupted you. Maybe I let you finish the thought, I don’t remember, but I know I already knew what I wanted to say. Just go ahead and write from the same the confidence that you speak from. (And if the opposite is true of you, speak from the same confidence you write with.) Don’t begin with an awareness of your weaknesses; begin with a strength you can leverage into action, into exercise. Then you’ll soon feel yourself getting stronger.

Anyway, as Descartes pointed out, few of us are willing to admit that our greatest weakness is our intelligence: that our real trouble is thinking. We’ll say we’re not good at public speaking or that writing “academically” is hard. But let’s get real about this. The hardest thing about going to university isn’t talking or writing; it’s understanding the material. If that wasn’t the main challenge you were seeking, you’re wasting your time. Find a harder program.

But here it’s even more important that you don’t begin with a conception of yourself as somehow weak. Find your strength and build on it. You understand many things perfectly well and some of them are what led you to enroll at this university, at this time, in this program. You may find finance hard but you know what money is. You may not yet know much about marketing but you can tell a sales pitch from a Sunday sermon. Hamlet’s state of mind may baffle you as much as it does him, but you know a thing or two about vengeance, right? Just keep bringing your readings and lectures back to things you understand. Don’t expect your professors to do this for you, since they can’t possibly know everything you know. And even if they could, how are they supposed to know that you know it? It’s up to you see the connections between what you already know and what you need to know for a course.

Now, you’re going to have to be open to the idea that you’re wrong about a number things. Sometimes learning is unlearning. And sometimes, annoying though it may be, learning something means relearning something in your last year that you unlearned in your first. That’s because an education is not a simple matter of acquiring and discarding beliefs one at time. It’s a continuous reorganization of your system of belief. Some beliefs cannot be held at the same time and there’s no simple rule to follow when deciding which ones to keep and which ones to abandon. It’s not uncommon to come back around to an idea you had previously decided was incompatible with a theory you thought was true. Having thought some more about the theory and its own internal contradictions, you’re free to consider the idea from a new point of view. That’s all part of the process. Relax and enjoy it. Your intelligence will show, not in how often you are right about things, but in what happens when you’re wrong.

Remember that “knowledge”, especially at a university, is a competence not a possession. You are becoming a knowledge-able person, some one who is able to know things. It’s the ability to make up your mind about something, to speak your mind about it, and to write it down. You’re not interested in getting more and more of it, so much as getting better and better at it. What you know will change, and will keep changing after you graduate. But how you know things will just keep improving. It takes some discipline, of course. You have to be willing to do something badly for a while until you learn how to do it well. Writing is one part of that, and an important one, so work on it every day. But keep it balanced with everything else you have to do. And remember, finally, that being good at something really does mean being able to enjoy it. When you’re learning something, you should be looking for the joy in it. Please keep that in mind.

That’s obviously not a very good question. When professors complain that their students “can’t write”, what they usually mean is that they’re getting worse, usually to some distressing degree. But they don’t mean that all the students are getting worse, of course; there will always be students in our classes who write clearly and lucidly, even when they are struggling with difficult material. And the mere fact that some students “can’t write a sentence to save their lives” is also entirely normal — the other end of the same, normal distribution. What they are worried about is the bulge in the middle, which they feel is moving in the wrong direction. As I argued in my last post, this feeling might not be grounded in rigorous scientific research, but it is usually not unfounded. It’s based on what is often decades of experience with the writing of cohort after cohort of undergraduates (and even graduate students), often at the same institution in the same program, and often taking the same classes covering the same content. Every now and then, someone sounds the alarm. They are, inevitably, called “alarmists”.

They aren’t always professors, however. Consider another group of stakeholders in student writing who can also boast of decades of experience judging the writing abilities of cohort after student cohort — the employers of university graduates. Leaving aside the employers of graduate students, i.e., dissertation supervisors, consider a complaint we sometimes hear from industry representatives. “Ten years ago, if we hired someone with decent grades from one of your top programs, we could be sure they could write with clarity and confidence. These days, we have to test their writing ability before we hire them. What gives?” Notice, again, that they’re not making an absolute judgment about all students. They’re registering a trend — though in this case one that affects the top end of the grade distribution, which, they note with consternation, doesn’t overlap neatly with the distribution of writing ability. They wish it would. Like it did in the old days. (Update: To get a measure of this problem, see John Almy’s piece in IHE, where he cites an Inc. article that says that US companies spend over 3 billion dollars annually on remedial writing instruction.)

Because we’re talking about a trend in the distribution of an ability (writing) that can be leveraged (whether by educators or employers) in other pursuits (like knowing, creating, and selling things), this discussion can’t be approached as an attack on, or defense of, students as a whole. And this is why I don’t find the dismissal of “critics of student writing” as “alarmists” convincing. Not only does a general defense of the whole population of students not actually address the problem that the critics are interested in, it is completely implausible to me that the student population, in its entirety, has been subject to no change in writing ability over the past, say, three decades. Given the profound changes in the composition of the student body, the changes in university culture and pedagogy, and the rapid technological transformation of media, it would be very surprising if student abilities hadn’t adapted. Some of the changes speak to improvements (presumably the goal of pedagogical innovation) others suggest the opposite (here we have the old chestnut about the effect of social media on attention and literacy). But, surely, given all of the change we see around us, we wouldn’t expect the students’ writing skills alone to remain static. Surely, we would expect some change here too.

In her response to Robert Zaretsky (and his ilk), Elizabeth Wardle deftly sidesteps this issue by asserting, on the basis of “decades [of] resarch about student writing”, that “students are what they’ve always been: learners. There is no evidence that student writing over all is any better or worse than it has ever been. What is true is that faculty members have been complaining about student writing for as long as students have been writing.” The only studies I know of that somewhat support the claim that students are “no better or worse” than they’ve ever been show that they make about the same amount of language errors, while the kinds of errors have been changing. But until someone shows me some medical-grade randomized control trials of student writing, I’m not really buying that we’ve adequately studied the problem. In fact, the “evidence” for the perennial nature of faculty complaints is probably more rigorous than then evidence we have to base our judgments of student writing on. To say that there is “no evidence” for a decline is merely to say the problem is very difficult to study, and we’re probably going to have to rely on the expert testimony of, you guessed it, faculty.

I think there’s good reason to think that the quality of student writing is declining. I also think that experienced faculty members are qualified, by precisely that experience, not just to render a judgment, but to sound the alarm when they feel the need. And when they do sound the alarm, I think it is utterly counterproductive for composition teachers, and directors of writing centers, to tell them that they are simply wrong, “plug ignorant about how writing works,” and that they should let up on their students. When they do this, they only confirm what Robert Zaretsky suspects. “We might urge the student to pay a visit to the writing center. Such centers, however, are as easily abused as used, often reduced to the pedagogical equivalent of the confessional, a place where students are absolved, not cured, of their writing sins.” Academic writing instruction should address the concerns of faculty, not dismiss them. The truth is that many students need to work harder at their writing if they are to reach a level that will impress both their current professors and their future employers. The amount of students who need to do this work, and who don’t do enough of it, is, I suspect, growing in some programs of some institutions, while, in others, the trend is more promising. It depends, in part, on the students themselves, but also on their teachers, both of content and of writing. And it depends especially, I want to say, on the coordination that is achieved between content teachers and writing teachers. This rhetoric that pits us against each other is simply not helping matters.

At first pass, this might seem like a no-brainer. “Of course our writing instruction should be based on research about writing!” we want to say. But some strong versions of this claim have given me pause. “If you’re not in writing studies, you no longer get to write those articles about how students can’t write,” Amanda Fields recently said on Twitter. “All you have to do is scratch the surface of composition history and theory to understand how ridiculous you sound when you claim that students can’t write.” I think she was referring to the same Robert Zaretsky piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that I mentioned on Friday. That piece (and my post) is probably also what Elizabeth Wardle was thinking of when she tweeted that “there is something to know about teaching and learning writing. Our students deserve to be taught from research-based practices. Otherwise you are actually harming them.” Can we really dismiss experience-based criticism of student writing as “ridiculous”, merely because it doesn’t come from a professor of writing studies? Does it “actually harm” our students to be taught how to write by teachers who, let’s say, “merely” do a lot of writing and reviewing themselves as part of their own scholarship? That’s what I want to think about.

Consider a more modest activity. Suppose we weren’t talking about the basis on which we teach writing but the basis on which we offer advice. Does writing advice have to be research-based? I can’t imagine that Fields and Wardle would insist on it. After all, a lot of the advice we pass on to our students comes from working journalists and novelists, i.e., people who have a demonstrated ability to write but have neither the time nor the desire to study it formally. They just have their experiences to draw on, and they’re often happy to share them in the form of tips, or sometimes even “rules”, for good writing. Do we dismiss Stephen King’s writing advice as baseless because he doesn’t have a PhD in writing studies? Or do we just take it with the requisite grain of salt? I think the answer there is obvious and I think we’d have to grant that Zaretsky is an accomplished enough scholar to offer academic writing advice in this spirit.

And research, in fact, also has to be taken with a grain of salt. I used to cite Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift to my students, hoping to persuade them that “research shows” that writing makes you smarter and group work makes you dumber. (I didn’t say it exactly like that.) But then I read Freddie deBoer’s critique and realized that it wasn’t as simple as that. I still believe that writing is good for you and that group work is better for learning how to work in groups than for learning course content, but I no longer declare this to be demonstrated by “the research”. (I still sometimes mention it, I must admit.) The point is that the rhetorical force of an appeal to research isn’t univocal. To invoke research is always to invite critique and this commits you to a longer conversation. At the extreme end, we have research like that of the Cornell Food Lab, which had a great influence on the management of, e.g., school cafeterias, until it was discovered to be of doubtful quality. Interestingly, the problems were not discovered by peers and practitioners applying the insights, but by outsiders who were intrigued by the lab’s director’s methodological claims.

Indeed, application itself can become a source of error. If you’re going to provide research-based instruction you’re going to have to translate a study’s results into implications for your own practice. You’ll have to prepare a lecture that will work with your particular students and design an assignment that is relevant for them. If the study is going to guide your own practices, you have to be very sure that you understand its results. Even if a certain intervention has been found to have a positive effect, it may be that too much of it will end up having a negative effect. Or it may be that the effect depends on doing or not doing something else at the same time, or before, or after. Failing this, the whole thing may either be a waste of effort or outright harmful. I should say that I’m less worried about “doing harm” than some writing scholars — like Wardle, quoted above — but if we’re “actually harming” our students when we don’t base our pedagogy on research, then surely that possibility remains if we misunderstand that research?

Wardle describes pieces like Zaretsky’s as expressions of “frustration with a few student writers” from which teachers draw “conclusions based solely on their own experiences, histories, and biases.” Against this, she demands “not personal feelings and frustrations, but research-based evidence grounded in more than a sample of one.” Indeed, “the field of rhetoric and composition [has] spent decades gathering such research about student writing,” she tells us.

This all sounds very impressive and it seems perfectly reasonable to value such research. But isn’t she here pitting it against a straw man? Is it fair to characterize Zaretsky’s ideas about student writing as grounded in a sample of one? Hasn’t he been exposed to hundreds, even thousands of student essays by now? And can’t he also claim to have thought about the problem for decades, i.e., his whole career? Is it accurate to say he’s merely expressing his “personal feelings”? I imagine his experiences are a lot more serious than that, and he has probably even carried out a few experiments to test his ideas. Also, though he may use only a few students as examples, he is obviously presenting them as representative of a general problem. He’s not saying it holds for all students, only that there is a significant group of students that can’t write as well as he’d like. Importantly, it’s his considered opinion that they could write better if he took the time to teach them. Does he really need to carry out a fullblown study of writing practices to support that claim? Can’t he just express his experience-based opinion and see where the discussion leads?