[In an effort to get more specific and address more of the what, why, and how of my teaching practice, I'd like to outline how I begin to move students away from the five-paragraph essay and toward a more sophisticated understanding of writing. This is a long post because I want to be specific. I hope some of the ideas will be helpful. I also hope to hear suggestions for improvement or possible flaws / gaps in what I outline here.]

One of my goals for my English students is to help them to ride their bikes without training wheels. By this I mean: to liberate them from the five-paragraph essay and help them to understand discourse as a flexible, persuasive act that nevertheless still makes identifiable moves.

I start by using the bike analogy. Training wheels aren’t bad things, and can help us to learn to ride a bike. After a while, though, they become more limitation than help. At some point, the wheels have to come off if we’re going to ride fast, make sharp turns, handle more treacherous terrain, or perform any tricks.

At first, the uncertainty and instability of a bike without training wheels can be intimidating, and there may be some hard falls before any real skill can be attained. Eventually, though, the instability is appreciated as the very thing that allows more interesting bike riding to occur.

So it is with writing. We discuss this idea and analogy for a while, taking note of what is worth keeping of the five-paragraph form. Some of this is obvious, some implied but rarely explained, namely:

• “Real” communication is persuasive and almost always has a “point.” (Even if you just say “hi” to someone in passing, you’re persuading them to notice you and to respond in kind.)
• Organization is a tool writers use to help readers understand them. We should think carefully about how and why we organize a piece as we move away from a proscribed model.
• Claims (i.e., thesis statements) require arguments that support them, and arguments should be based on evidence.
• When we offer evidence in support of an argument, we must take time to explain how and/or why that evidence does indeed support the argument.

(I present this information as review, but unfortunately, for some students this is not a review but a new lesson. These students become the ones I will have to focus on more closely as we progress.)

At any rate, after this review, I introduce them to the parts of discourse and stress that these parts do not necessarily correspond to paragraphs and that, except for the introduction and conclusion, do not necessarily have any set order.

• Introduction: in which the writer ingratiates and informs
• Statement of Fact: in which the writer provides background information where appropriate
• Affirmation: in which the writer puts forth the arguments for his/her position, providing evidence (and corresponding explanation)
• Refutation: in which the reader addresses opposing arguments, either by showing them to be inaccurate or by qualifying the argument, conceding some points but not others, or arguing that the refutation does not invalidate the thesis.
• Conclusion: in which the writer reminds the reader of major points, reflects on the significance of the writing if it’s not already obvious, and relates the writing to larger concerns (what we often call the “so what?” factor).

While this still provides some structure, I demonstrate to students that this structure is nowhere near as rigid as the five-paragraph form by reading “real-world” articles and analyzing them in terms of the parts of discourse. In doing this, we see how different authors handle these different moves, and that some moves are left out completely or are greatly abbreviated depending on the content.

To help students see this in action, I pull articles that I’ve found interesting in the last week and think students will also enjoy. This week, they all happened to come from the New York Times.

• The Brain on the Stand - An essay with a two-paragraph introduction in which the thesis and the basic information about what the essay will cover are both implied. We focused on the moves the author makes to ingratiate the reader (the “little-noticed case,” the violence and excess of the case in question, the cyst “nestled in his arachnoid membrane,” the provocative questions at the end of the second paragraph) and the subtlety of the implied thesis (we need to start thinking seriously about the implications of neuroscience for our legal system). Incidentally, some of the students finished examining the article on their own and have started some interesting discussions in the forum.
• Battle of the Manly Men: Blood Bath with a Message - I knew that many of my students had seen 300 over the last week and were excited about it. This review is much different in its approach than the neuroscience article, and so served as a good contrast. Still, the parts of discourse are present. The introduction is also the thesis, and it’s about as blunt as you can get. We considered some of the “arguments” provided by the reviewer (and my students criticized his lack of direct evidence with phrases like “you can’t just say the acting’s bad, you have to prove it”), and the conclusion’s ability to remind, reflect, and (sarcastically) relate in three short sentences.
• Woman vs. Female - In this article, the thesis is implied, isn’t fully suggested until the end of the article, and relies heavily on the words of others to carry the message. This provided another helpful alternative to the other two.

In all three articles, we examined how the parts of discourse were functioning, what the author did on both the language and organizational levels to convey his/her meaning, and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches.

The next step is to begin transferring these skills to their own writing. This is where the crashes start to happen. By now, they are comfortable with writing reflective response pieces that assert their opinions, make connections to the text, etc. They are also used to the structured, five-paragraph essay from previous years and from some of their other classes. We break new ground next week. More on that process in a later post.

Every year, some of my students express concern that if they try to “write like this” in their other classes, they’ll be penalized. Some students have told me their teachers won’t accept essays that aren’t written in the five-paragraph format. I wonder how much of this mindset has transferred to standardized tests that contain written portions. My advice to them so far has been to modify their writing to suit their audience, which is good advice in general anyway. “If your other teachers want a five-paragraph essay, give it to them … just know that you’re no longer dependent on that form.”

No bikes allowed?

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