Quick Write for Missed Class on 3/14

Question 1: Michelle Kenney’s article “The Politics of the Paragraph” discusses the problems with teaching the five-paragraph essay. She disputes one common thought on formulaic writing, that writing formulas are like training wheels, and you need to “know the rules in order to break them.” In your own experience in high school, did you learn the five paragraph formula or other formulaic writing? Did you find that it helped you become a better writer? If you were taught formulaic writing in school, did you have any issues when you started writing on the college level? Or did you find that formulaic writing helped prepared you for college writing?

Response:

In high school, we had the exact five paragraph essay formula mentioned in the article. I can break it down for you:

In the intro, start with a catchy hook. Provide some background information on the text and then formulate a thesis that includes 3 ideas - these will be your three paragraphs. Each paragraph needs to start with a topic sentence that connects the main idea of the paragraph back to the thesis. You then need to cite quotes or textual evidence, making sure to integrate them properly, and then give a warrant. Repeat, repeat, repeat. In the conclusion, restate your thesis, summarize your points, and ask some big-picture rhetorical question.

I probably wrote fifty of these essays over my high school career, forty of which were during my junior and senior years when I was taking AP english courses. They were suppose to be "college" level courses preparing us for the years following high school. Unfortunately, they didn't.

I did really well on the writing portion of my SAT's because I followed this five paragraph format. It has a time and a place, that is for sure, but when I got to college I was amazed when teachers actually wanted out of the box ideas, critical thinking, and papers that broke the formula of the "five paragraph essay." I got decent grades on my initial papers because I had been taught how to write well but my teachers kept asking - Give us more. Go further. What is your real argument?

The "five paragraph essay formula" doesn't ask you to think in depth about a topic or a text. It asks you to analyze imagery, rhetoric, and symbolism and explain how they all relate back to a central theme. In college, I began to understand texts and ideas on a new level because I was finally challenging myself when it came to writing about them.

I can remember in my first semester when my first year writing professor told us we could use "I" in our essays and the entire class notably gasped. It was incredibly humorous, thinking back. We considered it a crime to state our own opinion in the work we completed.

I completely agree with Kenney that you have to "know the rules in order to break them." My high school writing career certainly helped me in college, in the formation of essays and the timeliness I had to write them. However, I wish that someone had told me, okay, now it's time to break the rules. I wish that happened in high school.