Language Investigation #2

The five-paragraph-essay. I have been trying to escape this writer’s trap for most of my adult life. For some, it’s like a black hole that consumes creative capacity. It captured and consumed me until I reached my later years of high school. I blame the five-paragraph essay for many of my writing woes because it disabled me from thinking outside the box.

In elementary and middle school, it was like if you set foot out of the five-paragraph essay form, the entire world was going to topple down on you. Not a toe could walk the line between a fifth and sixth paragraph for fear of upsetting the predetermined balance of your writing. It had to be five: Intro, Body, Body, Body, Conclusion. Like clockwork.

What I find even more constricting than the five-paragraph essay is the thesis statement. I was first introduced to “topic sentences” in my early years of elementary school. I was told to fold a piece of paper into three partsand label each section: Topic Sentences, Supporting Sentences, and Ending Sentence. Each of these categories had its own heading with a colored indicator made to resemble a traffic light (green, yellow, red) in the left hand margin. The class would then proceed to pick apart a given paragraph and copy the sentences in the appropriate place. It doesn’t get more structured than that.

In high school, the “topic sentences” morphed into a “thesis statement.” After hearing the word “thesis” for the first time in my freshmen composition class, I went home and asked what a “thesis” was, honestly thinking it sounded like some sort of nasty disease. Little did I know that it would turn out to be synonymous with the nasty disease as I first suspected. After my parents explained what it was, a wash of dread overcame my brain and my writing hand: topic sentence. Green, yellow and red traffic lights and tri-fold pieces of lined paper invaded my thoughts and consumed my daydreams. Not this again, I thought.

Then, in my AP Language class, I took a risk; I wrote a sixth paragraph, then a seventh and an eighth. Before I knew it, I was breaking the law. I was running topic sentence traffic lights left and right. When I loosened the writing noose around my neck, writing became fun. Without being confined to a five-paragraph box, I was free to add as much as I wanted wherever and whenever I felt the need. I wish some of my other classmates were so lucky.

My dorm roommate last year would always ask for me to proofread her papers. Before I would consent, I would ask her how long it was, implying that I wanted her to tell me how many paragraphs there were. The answer was always the same: five. In not-so-dramatic terms, I would explain to her the damage she was inflicting on herself: How can her ideas be completely formed if every paragraph is between three and five sentences within a five-paragraph structure? How did she make it this far without ever breaking the chains and tasting freedom? She would explain that she simply was incapable of writing beyond five paragraphs, each containing three to five sentences. Oh, the humanity!

My real run-in with the structure law was when I started working for the local newspaper, The Greeley Tribune. It was my senior year of high school and I had two AP English classes under my belt; I thought I knew the ins and outs of writing because I had figured out the weakness of the five-paragraph essay. I was in for a shock. I sat down and wrote my first piece (an editorial) and took it to my supervising editor to proofread. The first thing she did was split up my eight paragraph piece into even smaller paragraphs. “In the newspaper business,” she said, “people don’t like big chunks of text; they want to skim it and get the vital information from it, not read every little bit of poetic prose you so thoughtfully included.” Ok, I get it: the smaller paragraphs make it easier to read, which is understandable. She then started finding synonyms for some of my “elevated” language I had originally used. “The general populace reading our newspaper has an average reading level of about the seventh grade. We need to make the news accessible to everyone.” Seventh grade reading level? Stretching the five-paragraph structure to include at least twice that many? Unheard of! But true.

As if the seventh grade reading level of the general populace of Greeley, CO isn’t shocking enough, I think the most surprising part of the story is that five-paragraph essays are impractical. It won’t help you in college and it definitely won’t help you in the workplace. It may have been appropriate at one time in our lives (elementary and middle school), but the incessant drilling of the five-paragraph essay as an ideal writing structure is worthless and obsolete to us that this point. So go ahead, run as many traffic light as you wish and write that sixth paragraph; the Topic Sentence Law Enforcement can’t stop you now.