In This Chapter
If you’re like most First Year Composition students, you’ve likely spent many years learning how to master the five-paragraph essay. You might be comfortable with picking three points for your thesis and body paragraphs. You may have also been very successful at implementing the form.
Why should you think about moving beyond the five-paragraph essay?
The five-paragraph essay can be an important and useful tool in helping students learn to structure their writing and to find enough supporting evidence to build a complete argument. It can be very helpful for short writing assignments. However, once you get into college courses, you will probably find that the rules of the five-paragraph essay impose limitations that actually make writing tasks more difficult.
Reasons to Move Beyond
Length of Writing Assignments: The five-paragraph essay works best for assignments that are not longer than 3 pages. Unless you have very long paragraphs, it will be difficult to meet a longer page-length requirement. Using very long paragraphs also runs the risk of creating paragraphs that are not unified. In general, college-level essays will require more than five paragraphs.
Complexity of Writing Assignments: The five-paragraph essay gives students a target: pick three points and you’ve succeeded in the writing task. However, in college-level courses, your professors will never want the minimum. Instead, they will be looking to see if you understand the complete topic. Often, you will not be able to demonstrate your complete level of understanding with only three points or three paragraphs.
- There may be more than three essential points to adequately cover the topic.
- Each of the points will likely have multiple sources and perspectives, which will require additional paragraphs. A single paragraph per point or idea usually isn’t enough.
- You may have fewer than three essential points, but the points you have need to be covered in much greater depth.
- Academic essays are arguments that require counter arguments to be acknowledged. In a five-paragraph essay, using a paragraph for the counter argument means that one third of your argument is the other side’s opinion.
In general, once you are required to write longer essays about more complex topics–especially as you build your skill with argument and research–five paragraphs will not be enough.
Importance of the Rhetorical Situation: One final reason to move beyond the five-paragraph essay is that relying on the format, rather than on the specific rhetorical situation of the writing task, can cause students to select weak or ineffective reasons and evidence. Often students using the five-paragraph essay will pick three points at random. Often, they’re the first three points the student can think of or that the student found in their research. But if the reasons and evidence in your argument aren’t clearly related and don’t build on one another in logical ways, the entire essay will be negatively affe