Rethinking the Relationship Between the Five-Paragraph Essay and Journalism

I have never been a fan of the five-paragraph persuasive essay.

You're likely familiar with the format: you start with an introductory paragraph that contains a thesis and a list of three supporting points. Paragraphs two through four expand on your supporting arguments with details. In the final paragraph, you're supposed to come up with a pithy conclusion that restates your introduction in different words.

My former criticisms of this technique were myriad. It's a boring way to write. It doesn't allow for much creative freedom. Not all arguments have exactly three supporting points, and not all supporting points need elaboration. Conversely, a single supporting point may take more than one paragraph to explain.

Most importantly, there is almost no situation in the real world in which a piece of writing takes the form of a five-paragraph essay.

Glenda Moss, who is now Associate Dean of the College of Education at Pacific University in Oregon, related in a 2002 article for The Quarterly how she became disillusioned with the five-paragraph essay while teaching middle school in Texas. The ubiquitous essay format increased students’ standardized test scores to the detriment of their expressive abilities, she wrote:

“I now regret that I spent more time helping them to write to pass the TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills) than I did on helping my students to make the connection between writing skills as tools to express their thoughts, values, and beliefs.”

Over the last few weeks, though, I've begun to think differently.

My journey to enlightenment began March 28, when Professor Cindy Boynton came to introduce herself to the Publications class. She is set to take over from Professor Karyn Smith when she goes on maternity leave near the end of April.

Boynton was sharing her impressions of the March issue of Horizons with the class. She told one of the students that he had written her favorite article in the issue, but that he needed to break his paragraphs up more to conform to traditional journalistic style.

The student asked me about the paragraphing issue, and though I’d started to reply, we did not have the chance to discuss the matter at length.

I followed up with an explanatory email later that evening:

“Although there is no exact science to breaking up paragraphs, there are two major considerations we use in journalism. The first is pacing – how fast the story seems to “move” as you read through it. Shorter paragraphs make the pace faster, as do sentences that use active voice (longer paragraphs and passive voice tend to slow the pace). Most of the time, you want the pace to be as fast as possible.

“The other thing to consider is the “blocking” of ideas. As you probably know from writing persuasive essays, paragraphs are generally used to break up different ideas. In the standard five-paragraph essay, the first paragraph contains your thesis and lists your supporting arguments. Each of the middle paragraphs focuses on one of those supporting points, thus breaking the argument down into component parts.

“We do it a little differently in journalism. Each source gets a new paragraph, and each idea gets one, too. We use quotes strategically to highlight these ideas, which is why most are only one or two sentences long.”

I demonstrated the concept of idea “units” by taking one of the paragraphs from his article and breaking it up. At the end of each of the broken-up paragraphs, I identified the idea that made the sentences contained therein worthy of a new paragraph.

It was while composing the email that my opinions about five-paragraph essays began to change.

The five-paragraph formula can be used for good as well as evil. It provided me with a launching point from which to explain journalistic writing. The student understood the connection between ideas and article structure precisely because this is the link stressed in the more rigidly-defined five-paragraph format.

In her essay, “In Defense of the Five-Paragraph Essay,” Fairleigh Dickinson University composition professor Kerri Smith explains that the point of the essay formula is to teach students to organize their thoughts in a coherent “introduce-develop-conclude structure,” which, she argues, is the underlying structure of all expository writing.

“In fact, many professors would like nothing more than to help students build on this foundational form,” she writes. “The tragedy happens when students can’t organize their thoughts at all…”

Don’t get me wrong: I still believe that the focus on the five-paragraph essay in K-12 education to the exclusion of all other formats fails to prepare students for college and beyond.

Students should be taught that it is a guide, not a mandate to follow dogmatically. They should be taught why they are learning the structure at the same time they are learning how to follow it.

Inverted pyramids and other journalistic conventions would not seem so counterintuitive if students arrived in class knowing there is more than one way to organize writing. That might make our lives easier.

But getting rid of the five-paragraph essay would probably only make things worse, because we wouldn’t have common ground from which to talk about more complex forms.