The five-paragraph essay has taken root for explicable reasons, even if they are not good ones. They are easy to teach for the purposes of passing standardized assessments. The standardization makes them easier to assign and grade for teachers who are burdened with too many students. If the alternative is no writing at all, surely the five-paragraph essay is better. And perhaps it is. Many of the form’s proponents claim that once students master these basics they can then “play around with them,” but we have little evidence that this happens. It certainly isn’t in evidence in the first-year
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