A student recently came to my office hours with a paper that had overlong paragraphs. When we discussed the unfocused nature of the paragraphs, her rationale for the length of her paragraphs was interesting. She explained that when she received the prompt, she calculated the number of words in the paper based on the page length and then allocated words between three body paragraphs. By her own admission, this process had not been successful because the paragraphs became bloated to reach this self-imposed word count. This example demonstrates the way that the five-paragraph essay is an impediment to effective college writing. The biggest step that a student can take to transition from high school writing to college writing is moving beyond the five-paragraph essay and giving themselves permission to use as many paragraphs as necessary.
The five-paragraph essay as a model is comfortable because it is a staple of high school writing, and the prescriptive nature makes the writing process easier. The model, which is taught as good practice in high school classes, provides students with a formulaic way of writing an essay that has a utilitarian purpose. To plan a five-paragraph essay one must decide on three main points for body paragraphs and fill those ideas with evidence from the text without necessarily unifying these points into one argument. This is fundamentally utilitarian because it streamlines the writing process. For timed test like the AP exams where the goal of writing is to demonstrate knowledge as efficiently as possible, it is helpful to have this kind of rigid model that can be filled with the necessary information. It allows a student to quickly generate an essay that hits on three major points, which fits the purpose of much of high school work.
The issue with this approach at a college level is not that a five-paragraph essay automatically produces poor writing, but rather that the college writing is asking students to move beyond reproducing ideas in a rigid structure. High school writing is not inherently bad, and a student can write very competently within a constrained structure. Many of the principles that one learns through having a limited number of paragraphs, like how to use evidence or how to structure analysis, are vital to producing compelling and well-argued essays. However, the rigid and comfortable structure is effectively the training wheels of writing. It is to develop other skills, but one must eventually grow beyond it. The same student who can write competently within a five-paragraph essay can write even more compellingly once they move beyond it.
Once one moves to write more complex ideas, the five-paragraph essay becomes a hinderance because of its rigidity. There is a key difference between the goals of high school writing and college writing that cannot be fulfilled effectively through a rigid five-paragraph structure. Instead of demonstrating an understanding of the test through three different claims, students are being asked to make a single claim. This means that the paragraphs each serve as steps in a main claim and are connected to each other. Partitioning this claim into three parts and trying to force fit all the argumentative moves into three long paragraphs will kneecap an argument. There are two options for fitting a complex argument into a five-paragraph essay, and both do a disservice to the argument. The first option is to limit the argument to three subpoints, which cuts nuanced points that would aid in making a convincing argument. This approach makes the argument unnecessarily limited. The second option is to include all the points of the argument in three paragraphs loosely organized thematically. While this allows the student to include all of the points of their argument but results in long unfocused paragraphs. Both ways of trying to fit a complex argument into such a rigid structure ultimately weaken the writing. It is a disservice to well thought out arguments for them to be constrained by a set number of body paragraphs.
The biggest step that students can take to improve their writing from a high school level to a college level is to give themselves permission to use as many paragraphs as necessary for their argument. The necessary shift to liberate oneself from the limitations of the five-paragraph essay is to change how one conceives of body paragraphs. Rather than a thematic bucket into which to add subpoints, each body paragraph is a step leading to a central claim. The idea of paragraphs as part of the claim is vital in understanding that the argument dictates the number of paragraphs rather than the other way around. So, to return to the student carefully meting out words between paragraphs, a paragraph can be ended once the point is made if one is not confined to three body paragraphs. Students can always reach out to Writing Advisors in order to discuss how to structure essays and how to write more concise paragraphs. One of the goals of the writing program is to help make the step from high school level writing to college level writing, and Writing Advisors are avaliable to help students plan and execute their writing in ways that break from high school models like the five-paragraph essay. Taking the step of liberating oneself from the five-paragraph model is important not just for the sake of writing SOSC essays, but as a part of learning to write at a higher level. As the essays they are asked to write get longer, having the skill of making focused points will be invaluable.