Death of the Five Paragraph Essay

It is refreshing to know that I am not the only teacher who is sick and tired of the 5 paragraph essay! As Lindemann states, "the five paragraph theme rarely appears in the real world; it survives primarily in some English classes." It is a primary way to write, and it should not exist in any classroom past the 8th grade. Unfortunately, students at the high school level are still being drilled to write this way for the California exit exam, and for periodic assessments. In fact, I was taught to write this way. When I got into college, my professors would comment that I would not pass the class if I kept writing 5 paragraph essays because it limited my writing. I did not know what that meant until I read other sample essays that were models of what we should be writing. It was much more liberating to know that I did not have to follow that model. I'm not advocating that essays shouldn't be organized; they absolutely should be. However, the organization should not have anything to do with putting a number on how many sentences, or how many paragraphs. It is the content; grammar and spelling can always be edited at a later time.

The section on Paragraphing, specifically "Relating Part to the Whole" should be our main focus when teaching students how to write an essay. The number of paragraphs should not matter; it should be how each paragraph contributes to the essay and relates to the topic. "Teaching paragraphs-as-process implies, then, that we teach students how to discover relationships among ideas, words, and sentences. Instead of focusing on what paragraphs are, we need to teach students how to discover relationships and express them as units of discourse" (Lindemann 151). If we can look at the essay as a quilt, then each paragraph is a patch connected to another patch. The finished product is a gathering of patches that connect to create a "quilt".