The Five-Paragraph Formula

This week was definitely an eventful one for Writing 45. We annotated a text called Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay by Kimberly Hill Campbell and Kristi Latimer, where every myth regarding the format in which teachers teach their kids to write only in five-paragraph forms was debunked. I was able to reflect on what I believe is my ideal academic essay, and how I felt about the FPT (five-paragraph theme).

My ideal academic essay does not have any required number of paragraphs. My most productive writing sessions are when I am able to just let my thoughts hit the paper. When I can use my own voice to form sentences and structure, I am then able to write a beautiful essay. When I write using writing templates, I often use the aspects it consists of in order to form my essay. For example, I will look at how much evidence and commentary I need to support my claim. I will use the format as a guide, but I will not stick to strictly bounding by the number of paragraphs required. Coincidentally I am very used to being required to write my essays based on the five-paragraph formula. At first, I always thought that I would use this format in all of my essays, yet I came to learn that this was not the case.

While annotating this week's AGWR chapter reading, the argument was posed as to whether or not teachers should be teaching the five-paragraph essay format to their students, to which I said:

The five-paragraph essay formula is not meant for long-term writing styles. For students planning to write essays beyond High School, it would be beneficial for teachers to stop implementing the FPT.

When a student gets so used to writing in a specific format, their writing voice becomes restricted. Once a student gets to a level where they are not required to use the FPT, they will find themself unable to produce an effective writing piece. When a parent takes off the training wheels of their children's bicycles, they do this because they know their child has trained enough to not need the training wheels anymore. The same can be looked at with the five-paragraph format. A student trains their writing voice with the five-paragraph format, but they never get a chance to take the training wheels off. Once a student efficiently uses the five-paragraph formula as their writing training wheels, then they must establish their writing voice by getting rid of the FPT.

The Paraburger writing format is a format in which a paragraph can be represented in the form of a burger. This writing tool compares to the FPT as it is a formula that requires a certain amount of evidence pieces as well as the reasoning for each piece of evidence. These two formulas are not super different as the Paraburger is pretty much incorporated into each body paragraph of the five-paragraph essay.