bdouglas1
New member
- Joined
- Nov 27, 2018
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- American English
- Home Country
- United States
- Current Location
- United States
Hi,
I would like to inform all English teachers about the consequences related to teaching the five-paragraph essay format and hopefully stop teachers from doing so. Although you might view the five-paragraph format as a starting place for students to learn how to structure their essays, it ends up hurting them more than helping them in the long run and there are much better alternatives.
The major problem with the format is that the students get trapped using this structure for every single essay and don’t know how to structure their own work since it is the only strategy that they are taught. In both college and in the real world, 9/10 times your essay is going to need to be longer than 5 paragraphs. Since the students are only taught how to structure based on a template rather than the contents of their essay, they have no idea how to structure this new work and end up throwing paragraphs wherever they want which leads to confusing and unorganized writing.
Along with that, making the students structure their work based off a template leaves nearly no room for tone in their essays. As all teachers who have read this structure of writing know, this makes their essays extremely boring to read and very repetitive. Nobody in the real world is going to read a piece of work that doesn't have any tone and bores them, so the fact that we are teaching students to write in such a way doesn’t make any sense.
These are just a few of the problems related to teaching the five-paragraph format that can’t be resolved without getting rid of it and play key roles into why I believe that the five-paragraph format needs to stop being taught. English teachers should focus on teaching the students different structuring techniques instead. This will be much more beneficial for the students because it will teach them how to organize any piece of work that they create and will give them a much more natural writing style that following the five-paragraph format will never have.
If you would like additional information on the effects of the five-paragraph format, you can visit any of these sites:
[Hyperlinks removed]
Please let me know if you have any comments or questions.
I would like to inform all English teachers about the consequences related to teaching the five-paragraph essay format and hopefully stop teachers from doing so. Although you might view the five-paragraph format as a starting place for students to learn how to structure their essays, it ends up hurting them more than helping them in the long run and there are much better alternatives.
The major problem with the format is that the students get trapped using this structure for every single essay and don’t know how to structure their own work since it is the only strategy that they are taught. In both college and in the real world, 9/10 times your essay is going to need to be longer than 5 paragraphs. Since the students are only taught how to structure based on a template rather than the contents of their essay, they have no idea how to structure this new work and end up throwing paragraphs wherever they want which leads to confusing and unorganized writing.
Along with that, making the students structure their work based off a template leaves nearly no room for tone in their essays. As all teachers who have read this structure of writing know, this makes their essays extremely boring to read and very repetitive. Nobody in the real world is going to read a piece of work that doesn't have any tone and bores them, so the fact that we are teaching students to write in such a way doesn’t make any sense.
These are just a few of the problems related to teaching the five-paragraph format that can’t be resolved without getting rid of it and play key roles into why I believe that the five-paragraph format needs to stop being taught. English teachers should focus on teaching the students different structuring techniques instead. This will be much more beneficial for the students because it will teach them how to organize any piece of work that they create and will give them a much more natural writing style that following the five-paragraph format will never have.
If you would like additional information on the effects of the five-paragraph format, you can visit any of these sites:
[Hyperlinks removed]
Please let me know if you have any comments or questions.
Last edited by a moderator: