When I was in school, I started to learn the five paragraphs structure starting in middle school. The structure was drilled into our heads and even in high school we were forced to follow it. In high school some papers may have become six or seven paragraph essays, bit if we added more we were expected to stay on topic. As I got higher in grade we did begin to learn more about adding paragraphs beyond the typical five, but even then, it didn't help much to prepare for college.
When I started my first college classes and had to write essays, I was very overwhelmed. I would try to get all my ideas in as few paragraphs as possible and all my essays were terrible at first. I felt like I had to learn a new way of writing all together. When I started at RIC I started to map out my essays. By map out I mean a bullet list of all the paragraphs and what they would be about. My first bullet would say introduction of course, then I'd quickly write a one sentence summary. All the rest would be body paragraph numbers followed by what the paragraph would be about. This helped me a lot to organize my thoughts and stay on topic.
I have shown this method to students I've tutored for the past few years and they said it helped them a lot. One student, who is now in college, said it "saved" her when her essays were assigned because she knew how to approach them. Her classmate who graduated from high school with her still struggled.
I agree that the five paragraph structure is a form of training wheels for students, but when do we start to take the training wheels off and teach more advanced writing? I don't recall ever being taught how to go beyond five paragraphs in a productive way.
I really like your strategy for writing essays in college - I totally agree with the idea of that getting your many ideas down in so few paragraphs was incredibly difficult. Love the training wheels analogy, but experienced the same, that we never got past it like we were suppose to!
ReplyDeleteI agree that often times in high school, five paragraph essays set the basis for writing. I only had a couple of teachers who helped me go beyond the basic five paragraph essay. As much as I really hated the senior project requirement, I had to write a research paper and it really helped me dive into writing. My English teacher senior year was amazing and she really helped me with my paper. We completed the paper in multiple steps starting with source cards, note cards, an outline and then a rough draft. Instead of giving us the requirement of five paragraphs, she told me to put all of my note cards together by main topic. With that, she said we could have anywhere from 5-10 topics keeping in mind we needs 5-7pages for our paper. She helped us revise and edit the paper until it was good enough so we could pass the project and gradate. As much as the project was tedious and was clearly an assessment of standards, I am thankful for the help my teacher provided when it came to writing the essay portion.
ReplyDeleteI like that you developed your own formula. Did you haven any support for that in your intro comp class?
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