I never learned to write one.
Stanford education professor David Labaree says that the 5-paragraph essay “was meant to be a step on the way. Now it’s the stifling goal for student and scholar alike.”
Here is a taste of his piece at Aeon:
The issue is this: as so often happens in subjects that are taught in school, the template designed as a means toward attaining some important end turns into an end in itself. As a consequence, form trumps meaning. For example, elementary-school students learn to divide a number by a fraction using this algorithm: invert and multiply. To divide by ½, you multiply the number by two. This gives you the right answer, but it deflects you from understanding why you might want to divide by a fraction in the first place (eg, to find out how many half-pound bags of flour you could get from a 10-pound container) and why the resulting number is always larger than the original.
Something similar happens with the five-paragraph essay. The form becomes the product. Teachers teach the format as a tool; students use the tool to create five paragraphs that reflect the tool; teachers grade the papers on their degree of alignment with the tool. The form helps students to reproduce the form and get graded on this form. Content, meaning, style, originality and other such values are extraneous – nice but not necessary.
This is a variation of Goodhart’s Law, which says: ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’ For example, if test scores become the way to measure student and teacher success, then both parties will work to maximise these scores at the expense of acquiring the underlying skills that these scores are supposed to measure. Assess students on their ability to produce the form of a five-paragraph essay and they will do so, at the expense of learning to write persuasive arguments. The key distinction here is between form and formalism. A form is useful and necessary as a means for achieving a valued outcome. But when form becomes the valued outcome, then it has turned into formalism.
An extreme example of this phenomenon has emerged in the growing field of machine-graded essays. Having experts grade large numbers of papers, such as for the advanced-placement composition exercise that White took part in, is extremely labour-intensive and expensive, not to say mind-numbing. So the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and other companies have come up with automated systems that can take over this function by deploying a series of algorithms that purportedly define good writing.
Read the entire piece here.
There is an excellent book on the subject, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, by John Warner. As a purveyor of the five-paragraph essay in preparing students for the AP World History and AP U.S. History exams this is a direct criticism of my teaching. But I understand the underlying issue. It is form over content. We teachers probably are guilty of emphasizing the form to our students. And, as readers of their essays, may have been overly impressed that they could perform the format. Yet in the end content is the essential component.
I think of a form such as a sonnet. It is a very restrictive form and many have the form down well but the poem doesn’t work if there is vapid content. The kudos go to those who can use the form effectively to communicate thought and emotion. If you hand a student a prompt and give her 40 minutes to write an essay an excepted form helps a lot. But, the content is what counts and is the only part that receives credit. I noticed that the authors of the hate the five-paragraph essay did not provide more forms for consideration. Content is most important, but form helps deliver the goods.
Good points, Ron. I will check out Warner.