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Five paragraph essays are by far the most utilized type of writing in English class from elementary school to high school. While generally there will be the odd unique writing activity here and there, graded assignments almost always follow this format.
It makes sense since it has clear rules, teaches students to organize arguments within paragraphs, and helps them learn to embed proof for their claims in the form of quotations from textual evidence. This formulaic approach makes it fair to grade and easy for students to understand, and so it is a solid staple to rely on.
Additionally, its simplicity still escapes students sometimes, and so surely until students have mastered it, there is some use in including it in the curriculum.
However, is this truly the best way to prepare students to be critical readers and writers? Outside of an academic context, when are five paragraph essays used? Even at a college level, the five paragraph essay is far too simple and unrealistic to really be an effective text type for students to be creating.
While perhaps useful to introduce the basics of organizing writing, high school students need to be pushed further beyond essays into exploring creating various text types that could actually prepare them for careers in writing such as political articles, science writing, and much to the chagrin of purists, even social media posts and advertisements. If leaders of the world use the text type, it can no longer be considered beneath critical analysis.
Question to Consider
What are some of the types of writing adults who aren’t teachers are exposed to?
Make a list of everything you can think of and check off each type that your class covers in depth.
How to Move Beyond Five Paragraph Essays
Instead of focusing on rigid formatting of five paragraph essays, teachers should focus on giving students frameworks of thought and allowing them to explore organization in a more organic way. Teaching students about the rhetorical appeals of Logos, Pathos, and Ethos will help them to look at almost any type of text more critically from advertisements to political articles posted on social media.
Study Authorial Intent Through Social Media Posts
Rather than giving students one text that all students must cover regardless of their personal interests or future aspirations, tell students to investigate how a celebrity or politician of their choice uses the rhetorical appeals on their social media accounts.
Sites like Red Feed, Blue Feed are great for giving students an introduction to titles and images and help them to explore the rhetorical appeals in real world practice with partners or as a class before moving on to independent research on a politician or celebrity of their choice.
A possible assessment for this unit could be for students to write an investigative article about their chosen celebrity or politician detailing how they use at least two rhetorical appeals along with a set number of pieces of evidence from their social media profiles. Additionally, the teacher could say that all students’ work will be organized together into a magazine style publication and shared with the class or even the whole school.
When students get to choose who they research, they will be far more interested in their work and if they know that their opinions will be published for all to see, they will be all the more invested in showing how important, interesting, or dangerous their chosen subject is. Generally, students care much more about impressing their peers than they do the teacher.
Teach Calls to Action Through Persuasive Speeches
Another idea for later in the year could be to have students do a speech actually utilizing the rhetorical appeals themselves. Teachers could start with a discussion on this article to discuss the dangers of passivity on social media and the importance of having a clear call to action when trying to create change. Then, teachers could challenge students to give a TED talk style persuasive speech on a topic of their choice.
Rather than limiting students to specific topics, teachers should only require that the students have a clear and actionable call to action in their speech in addition to requiring them to use at least two rhetorical appeals with the target audience of their classmates in mind.
Students should avoid vague calls to action such as calling for their classmates to “be more sustainable” or “work harder in school” as these aren’t actionable calls to action. Instead students should give extremely specific calls to action such as suggesting people stop using plastic water bottles or use a specific study strategy along with giving convincing reasons as to why their classmates should follow their advice.
The topic that students choose doesn’t matter, because the goal isn’t for students to speak about something specific, but to speak about their passions in a confident and convincing manner. This allows for more serious students to pick serious topics that are important for them while allowing students who like a bit more fun to choose funny or interesting topics. Humor is certainly a good tool for convincing a crowd, and so this opens up the classroom for more personalities to express themselves while still learning the class objectives.
In addition, because the students will be performing their speeches in front of each other, they can all learn from what makes styles that are different from their own effective as well. This will help create a more balanced classroom where everyone is better able to respect differences and learn from one another.
A benefit of this type of assignment over five paragraph essays is that students can do follow up research after their speech to see how many students have actually followed their advice. This gives a much more realistic measure of success for their speech’s success rather than just a grade based on objective metrics that the teacher will have to use. While the teacher’s opinion is important, especially for ensuring students have actually used the rhetorical appeals and calls to action correctly, in the end, the goal was to convince their target audience to actually do something.
Even if the project technically gets a low grade because it didn’t follow the instructions fully, breaking from the mold often ends up being successful in the real world. While a serious and high achieving student’s passionate speech calling for donations for refugees might be beautifully crafted, if it doesn’t create any change, despite its beautiful use of literary techniques and powerful rhetoric that make the teacher smile, it has failed in its task.
Why Students Must Move Beyond Five Paragraph Essays
When people today struggle to recognize fake news, are swayed by pseudoscience rhetoric, and utilize social media as their sole source of information, teachers need to prepare students for the realities they will face rather than only covering idealistic essays on fine art.
Research shows that the brain learns information in the context it is given, and transfer is not reliable. (Brown, Collins, & Duguid) Teaching students to be critical readers of The Crucible, for example, will not help them be critical readers of political rhetoric or science writing.
Additionally, according to the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) report released by the United States Department of Education in 2019, over 20% of adults could only read at PIACC level 1 (approx. 6th grade reading level), which is not “sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences.” (PIACC).
English teachers need to take a good look at the types of texts they are requiring all students to read, give more choice to students in what types of texts they read, and encourage more independent reading to help boost literacy rates.
If 20% of adults struggle with middle school level reading, are they really going to be able to write insightful five paragraph essays on Shakespearean English in High School?
Does it even matter if they can or can not? How will it affect their lives as nurses, plumbers, architechts, or financial advisors? The vast majority of students are not going to go into a career of teaching or studying literature.
However, the vast majority of students will have to be critical readers of social media and be able to passionately express their views in a convincing way to others, even if that is just in job interviews. Teachers in general education classes need to focus on teaching skills that will benefit the majority of students, not a select few elites.
This type of teaching may benefit some who already have a solid foundation and an interest in literature as an art form, but will not help those who are struggling to catch up or don’t value classical literature as an art form, leading to more people following the whims of chain mails, Facebook posts, and simple speaking populist politicians.
Sharing Ideas
Remember that these are just two possible ideas. Discuss with other teachers some ideas to include other text types and try to collect more realistic assessments and projects that aren’t essays covering as many of the types of writing you listed before.
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References
Brown, J., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1176008
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Program for the
International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), U.S. PIAAC 2019
