This handout shall help you determine what your college instructors expect once they provide you with a writing assignment.


It will inform you how and just why to go beyond the five-paragraph essays you learned to write in senior school and start writing essays that are more analytical and much more flexible.

What exactly is a five-paragraph essay?

Twelfth grade students are often taught to publish essays using some variation of this five-paragraph model. A essay that is five-paragraph hourglass-shaped: it starts with something general, narrows down in the middle to talk about specifics, and then branches out to more general comments at the end. The first paragraph starts with a general statement and ends with a thesis statement containing three “points”; each body paragraph discusses one of those “points” in turn; and the final paragraph sums up what the student has written in a classic five-paragraph essay.

How come high schools teach the model that is five-paragraph?

The five-paragraph model is a good option to learn to write an essay that is academic. It’s a version that is simplified of writing that requires one to state a thought and support it with evidence. Setting a limit of five paragraphs narrows your alternatives and forces you to master the basic principles of organization. Furthermore—and for several twelfth grade teachers, this is actually the crucial issue—many mandatory end-of-grade writing tests and college admissions exams such as the SAT II writing test reward writers who proceed with the essay format that is five-paragraph.

Writing a essay that is five-paragraph like riding a bicycle with training wheels; it’s a device that will help you learn. That doesn’t mean you should forever use it. When you can write well without one, you can cast it off and not look back.

The way college instructors teach is probably different from everything you experienced in senior high school, and so is exactly what they expect from you.

While senior school courses tend to focus on the who, what, when, and where regarding the things you study—”just the important points”—college courses request you to think about the how as well as the why. Can help you very well in high school by studying hard and memorizing a lot of facts. Although college instructors still expect you to know the known facts, they really worry about the method that you analyze and interpret those facts and just why you think those facts matter. Once you understand what college instructors are looking for, you can see a number of the factors why five-paragraph essays don’t work so well for college writing:

  • Five-paragraph essays often do a poor job of setting up a framework, or context, that can help the reader know very well what the author is attempting to say. Students learn in senior school that their introduction must start with something general. College instructors call these “dawn of the time” introductions. As an example, a student asked to go over the causes of the 100 years War might begin, “Since the dawn of time, humankind happens to be plagued by war.” The student would fare better with a more concrete sentence directly associated with what she or he is likely to say in the other countries in the paper—for example, a sentence such as “In the early 14th century, a civil war broke out in Flanders that would soon threaten Western Europe’s balance of power. in a college course” Before you turn in the final draft if you are accustomed to writing vague opening lines and need them to get started, go ahead and write them, but delete them. For more on this subject, see our handout on introductions.
  • Five-paragraph essays often lack a quarrel. Because college courses focus on analyzing and interpreting in the place of on memorizing, college instructors expect writers not just to understand the facts but also to create a disagreement about the facts. The best five-paragraph essays may do that. However, the conventional essay that is five-paragraph a “listing” thesis, for instance, “I will show how the Romans lost their empire in Britain and Gaul by examining military technology, religion, and politics,” in the place of an argumentative one, as an example, “The Romans lost their empire in Britain and Gaul because their opponents’ military technology caught up with their own in addition as religious upheaval and political conflict were weakening the sense of common purpose in the home front.” To get more with this subject, see our handout on argument.
  • Five-paragraph essays tend to be repetitive. Writers who proceed with the five-paragraph model tend to repeat sentences or phrases from the introduction in topic sentences for paragraphs, in place of writing topic sentences that tie their three “points” together into a coherent argument. Repetitive writing doesn’t help to move an argument along, plus it’s no fun to learn.
  • Five-paragraph essays often lack “flow.” Five-paragraph essays often don’t make smooth transitions from one thought to the following. The “listing” thesis statement encourages writers to take care of each paragraph as well as its main idea as a entity that is separate instead of to attract connections between paragraphs and ideas in order to develop an argument.
  • Five-paragraph essays often have weak conclusions that merely summarize what’s gone before and don’t say anything interesting or new. Within our handout on conclusions, these“that’s are called by us my story and I’m adhering to it” conclusions: they do nothing to engage readers and also make them glad they browse the essay. Most of us can remember an introduction and three body paragraphs without a repetitive summary during the final end to aid us out.
  • Five-paragraph essays don’t have any counterpart into the world that is real. Read your favorite newspaper or magazine; look through the readings your professors assign you; listen to political speeches or sermons. Can you find something that looks or sounds like a essay that is five-paragraph? One of the important skills that college can teach you, far above the niche case of any course that is particular is how to communicate persuasively in every situation which comes your way. The five-paragraph essay is too rigid and simplified to match most real-world situations.
  • Perhaps most crucial of all: in a essay that is five-paragraph form controls content, when it must be the other way around. Students start out with a plan for organization, and additionally they force their ideas to fit it. On the way, their perfectly good ideas get mangled or lost.

Let’s take an example according to our handout on thesis statements. Suppose you’re taking a United States History class, and the professor asks you to publish a paper on this topic:

    Compare and contrast the good factors why the North and South fought the Civil War.

Alex, getting ready to write her first college history paper, chooses to write a five-paragraph essay, just like she learned in high school. She begins by thinking, “What are three points i could speak about to compare the good reasons the North and South fought the Civil War?” She does a brainstorming that is little and she says, “Well, in class, my professor talked concerning the economy, politics, and slavery. I suppose I am able to do a paper about that.” So she writes her introduction:

    A civil war occurs when two sides in one single country become so angry at each and every other that they move to violence. The Civil War between North and South was a conflict that is major nearly tore apart the young United States. The North and South fought the Civil War for most reasons. In some cases, these reasons were the exact same, however in other cases they were very different. In this paper, i shall compare and contrast these reasons by examining the economy, politics, and slavery.

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