My background is in teaching college-level writing. I have a focus on teaching remedial classes, so I often had students in my classroom who had negative past experiences with writing. Much of my job was helping them to unlearn “rules” about writing that they had picked up over the years and create a more solid foundation that was focused on writing as a way to communicate first and foremost.

Unlearning the Five-Paragraph Essay

One of the most prickly rules to undo was dogmatic adherence to the five-paragraph essay. Many of my college students mistakenly believed that all “school writing” came in five-paragraph form. There was an introduction that laid out three points, those three points were explored in a paragraph each, and a conclusion summarized what the three points covered. Easy. Simple. Predictable.

Wrong.

It led to students trying to shoehorn three or four topics into a single paragraph because five paragraphs simply was not enough to cover everything. It led to students skipping huge portions of their ideas because they thought they had “too much” for an essay. It led to students stretching simple reflections that could have been covered in a paragraph or two into five paragraphs with a stilted framework. It led, in short, to bad writing.

Experts Agree the Five-Paragraph Essay is Flawed

I’m not the only one who feels this way about the five-paragraph essay. In fact, many people feel much stronger animosity toward the device than I do.

Writer John Warner has an essay that appeared in Inside Higher Ed titled quite simply “Kill the 5-Paragraph Essay.” Lest you think that’s just a click-bait title and the contents are actually more nuanced, here’s the opening line: “Let’s just go ahead and kill the 5-paragraph essay at all levels, everywhere.”

Susan Knoppow has similarly harsh words and points out that experts in writing pedagogy have been calling for an end to the practice for decades. She also points out something that I think is key to the whole conversation:

Yes, the five-paragraph format makes explaining expository writing straightforward. And in this age of rubrics and standardization, it makes correcting papers easy.

The five-paragraph essay as it is currently used is often more about making grading easier on teachers bound to specific rubrics (or, perhaps more often, standardized test graders who never even instruct the humans who produced the writing they evaluate) than it is about providing solid writing foundations for a life of inquiry and exploration.

Perhaps it is this reality that leads Ray Salazar to say the “five-paragraph essay is rudimentary, unengaging, and useless.”

Is it Really So Bad?

I’m inclined to agree with these writers. The five-paragraph essay isn’t a real thing. It’s a construct designed to provide instruction of a particular writing quality, and it should not dictate the final product of any writing—at any level.

I’d go so far as to say that teachers should never assign a “five-paragraph essay” as part of their writing instruction. In fact, while there is some merit to holding students to strict length limits as a practice in discipline and meeting audience expectations, there is very little reason to ever tell a writer how many paragraphs their finished paper needs to be.

However, I do not go so far as to say that the five-paragraph essay needs to be eliminated entirely. I think it serves a specific purpose at a particular point in writing development.

It’s like training wheels on a bicycle. You don’t want them on there forever, but if you have a writer who is struggling to keep their balance, it can provide them with the confidence they need to get up and running more smoothly.

Using the Five-Paragraph Essay as a Tool

First, it’s important that teachers realize they never need to teach the five-paragraph essay. Just as some bike riders can go from gliding to pedaling without ever using an intermediary step (and there are even tiny little glider bikes without pedals designed specifically for this purpose), many writers can grasp the concepts of organization and paragraph separation without a five-paragraph essay to lay it out for them.

There’s nothing wrong with using the five-paragraph essay as a tool to make that illustration clearer, however. Students are not going to be forever scarred if they get five-paragraph essay examples as part of the many types of writing they see. They aren’t going to be doomed to write formulaic prose the rest of their lives if they write a five-paragraph essay to help them practice organization in late elementary school.

As long as teachers make it clear that the five-paragraph essay is a tool and not a rule, it can be a useful way to illustrate an important concept. Organization matters and paragraphs should be divided based on the topics they present rather than their length.