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 affected.
Parts, Not Paragraphs
Moving beyond the five-paragraph essay doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting the important concepts and skills that it might have taught you.
For instance, the five-paragraph essay has many characteristics that are applicable to all good academic writing:
- Uses a clear introduction to orient the reader to the topic at hand
- Provides a strong thesis statement that previews the parts of the argument
- Relies on consistent organization, where the body paragraphs deliver on the promise of the thesis
- Requires a critical mass of information (more than one or two points) for a complete argument
- Includes clear evidence to support its claims
- Provides a concluding statement to finalize the argument
These characteristics are important to most of the college essays you will be required to write. But because the writing you do for your college courses will be more complex and require more research and source use, it’s necessary to build on the skills from the five-paragraph essay.
One easy way to begin building on the writing skills and knowledge that you already have is by thinking in terms of parts rather than paragraphs.
If we think about an essay as having parts, student writers can use the same organizational strategies that they learned in the five-paragraph essay, but now there is greater flexibility in the body. Rather than picking three points (which may or may not build on one another), writers have the option of selecting fewer points or more points. There is no set number of paragraphs. Instead, they should choose the number of paragraphs that best meets the needs of the specific situation.
The one difference here is that the body requires some acknowledgment of a counter argument. In the body of the essay, the writer must address other opinions and other voices.
Classical Argument
One of the most common ways to structure an essay is to use the structure of Classical Argument.
These are the parts of a classical argument:
- The introduction, which warms up the audience, establishes goodwill and rapport with the readers, and announces the general theme or thesis of the argument.
- The narration, which summarizes relevant background material, provides any information the audience needs to know about the environment and circumstances that produce the argument, and set up the stakes-what’s at risk in this question.
- The confirmation, which lays out in a logical order (usually strongest to weakest or most obvious to most subtle) the claims that support the thesis, providing evidence for each claim.
- The refutation and concession, which looks at opposing viewpoints to the writer’s claims, anticipating objections from the audience, and allowing as much of the opposing viewpoints as possible without weakening the thesis.
- The conclusion, which amplifies the force of the argument showing the readers that this solution is the best at meeting the circumstances.
To write a classically structured argument, you can follow the following steps:
- Introduce your issue. At the end of your introduction, most professors will ask you to present your thesis. The idea is to present your readers with your main point and then dig into it.
- Present your case by explaining the issue in detail and why something must be done or a way of thinking is not working. This will take place over several paragraphs.
- Address the opposition. Use a few paragraphs to explain the other side. Refute the opposition one point at a time.
- Provide your proof. After you address the other side, you’ll want to provide clear evidence that your side is the best side.
- Present your conclusion. In your conclusion, you should remind your readers of your main point or thesis and summarize the key points of your argument. If you are arguing for some kind of change, this is a good place to give your audience a call to action. Tell them what they could do to make a change.
Organizing Your Argument
Whether thinking of their essay in terms of parts or attempting a more classical structure, writers must make choices about how to order their reasons and supporting evidence. The following are organizational strategies that writers can select from when crafting their text.
Chronological
Writers who use chronological organization for their essay write about events that took place first in the beginning of the essay and then move to events that occurred later, following the order in which the events took place. Writers might use chronological for sections of their essay in which they detail events that have already taken place or to describe historical events relevant to their topic. Summary also requires chronological organziation.
General to Specific
With general to specific organization, the writer starts with a broad perspective and then moves in more closely to their subject or thesis. This organization allows imagined readers to enter the text at a more general level of detail that they can easily connect with. As the text progresses, the writer then gets more detailed, bringing the reader with them, and zooming in on the specific topic they are describing.
Specific to General
When using specific to general organization, the writer starts with details of their topic and then moves the focus to a broader context as they continue to write.
- Writers can start with their findings or their main point and then work backwards, describing how the more specific points fit into a larger context.
- Writers can start with very minute details of the situation they want to describe. Readers may not know exactly what the writer is describing, but as they continue reading, the writer reveals the context by zooming out more.
Problem-solution
In problem-solution format, writers describe a problem and then describe the solution to the problem. Not every essay topic can utilize problem-solution organization because there might not be a problem or a solution involved with the topic.
Spatial
Spatial organization is most useful when a writer has to describe a subject based on its location in space with other objects. To use this technique, writers could identify a concrete space to describe. Writers could also imagine their topic and how it relates to geography, such as describing relevant events in an order that progresses from east to west or north to south, depending on their purpose.
Reflect on Your Reading
- If you learned the five-paragraph essay, how much emphasis did your teachers place on ordering your points?
- How is the classical argument structure similar to the five-paragraph essay? How is it different?
- What mode of organization do you think would best meet the needs of your synthesis essay for Project 2? Explain why you think this organizational strategy is the most important for your audience, context, and purpose.
Remixed and Adapted from: Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Format
Works Cited
Aaron, Jane E. LB: the Little, Brown Handbook, Brief Version. Pearson Longman, 2014.
Shen, Fan. “The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English
Composition.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 40. no. 4, 1989, pp. 459-466.
Thelin, William. Writing Without Formulas. Second edition. Cengage, 2009.