10-second review: What is wrong with teaching the five-paragraph essay? The belief that asking students to write within a prescribed form (the 5-paragraph essay) suffocates their creativity. Assumes that students will write what is safe and correct at the expense of writing what they really want to express.
Comment: That never happened in my experience. The students began with topics they chose, used their experiences and shaped their messages in the format of “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them,” the format modeled by the five-paragraph essay.
The students often expanded the parts of the 5-paragraph essay to go well beyond 5 paragraphs. The introduction could go on for several paragraphs. The thesis sentence could be expanded into several sentences or even a paragraph as happens in many published writings. Details were expanded into several paragraphs albeit with a single topic sentence or a topic paragraph. The summary paragraph was usually just that—a single paragraph. RayS.
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