Writing A Five-Paragraph Essay: A Helpful Tutorial From An Expert
The 5 paragraph essay is the foundational essay on which all other essays you come across in your future endeavors will be based. This is one of the most rudimentary writing assignments but understanding each of the elements incorporated into it will help you to better understand and complete this task and all future writing assignments.
So what is included in the 5 paragraph essay?
The 5 paragraph essay is, as the name would suggest, five paragraphs in length. It is made up of an introduction, 3 body paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph. This assignment serves as a wonderful opportunity to truly practice organizational skills and to expound upon evidence. It also lays the foundation for understanding the body of any text that you write.
The introduction
The introduction is, as the name would suggest, where you introduce the content you are going to focus on any background information or introductory information to your piece. Production is where you present your thesis statement and a background related to the topic. This paragraph begins with a topic sentence which is also referred to as a thesis. This topic sentence should be the first sentence in the paragraph and at the end, your final sentence should be a transitional sentence which moves the reader to the body paragraphs. The sentences in between your topic sentence and your transitional sentence are designed to introduce to the reader the content they will explore within the confines of the body paragraphs should have one sentence for each of the body paragraphs.
The body
Body should have three key ideas to support your thesis with relevant evidence. Each of the body paragraph should contain one idea and inside of that you should have the topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph and the transitional sentence at the end to transition from one paragraph to the next.
The conclusion
The conclusion is the final aspects which works in tandem with your introduction. It should summarize the information you presented in each of your body paragraphs. It should have an opening statement which reiterates your thesis as well as one sentence for each of your three body paragraphs which reminds the reader what you presented and finally have a concluding sentence with a call to action or something that explains how your essay fits into the bigger picture.
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The introduction is, as the name would suggest, where you introduce the content you are going to focus on any background information or introductory information to your piece. Production is where you present your thesis statement and a background related to the topic. This paragraph begins with a topic sentence which is also referred to as a thesis. This topic sentence should be the first sentence in the paragraph and at the end, your final sentence should be a transitional sentence which moves the reader to the body paragraphs. The sentences in between your topic sentence and your transitional sentence are designed to introduce to the reader the content they will explore within the confines of the body paragraphs should have one sentence for each of the body paragraphs. My advice is to play around and see what works best for you. If you&rsquo1) Prewriting
Okay. Since I hate prewriting as a concept (seriously. You do all this work and you don&rsquo
- Read through your source material, and get an understanding of what you&rsquo
(How to outline, as well as how to write the intro paragraph, body paragraphs, a link to how to write conclusion paragraphs, and general tips all under the cut)
As you may have guessed, there are a number of ways to outline. The most basic looks like this:
Paragraph 1: Intro
Paragraph 2: [insert topic 1]
Paragraph 3: [insert topic 2]
Paragraph 4: [insert topic 3]
Paragraph 5: ConclusionFrom here, you can make things more and more detailed if you like. Some common things people put in outlines are:
My advice is to play around and see what works best for you. If you&rsquo From here, you can make things more and more detailed if you like. Some common things people put in outlines are: I'm happy to have sitting on my desk a fresh new copy of John Warner's Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities officially out next week. For anyone who teaches writing, or who just wants to understand how we entered this golden age of bad writing instruction, and who also wants to know how to escape it.
Killing the Five Paragraph Essay: A Book About Writing
I'm happy to have sitting on my desk a fresh new copy of John Warner's Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities officially out next week. For anyone who teaches writing, or who just wants to understand how we entered this golden age of bad writing instruction, and who also wants to know how to escape it.
Warner is a regular blogger for Inside Higher Education, and he turns up in a variety of other settings as well as having spent a couple of decades teaching writing on the college level. He knows the territory.
He's also heard the complaints about Kids These Days and how they can't write, and with the first few pages, he dispenses with the usual suspects (bunch of snowflakes with too many cell phones). So what's the answer?
The short answer is they write badly because we taught them to. The long answer takes up the first ten chapters of Warner's invaluable book.
We need to acknowledge first that we have always been complaining that students could not write, while also acknowledging that writing, unlike speaking, is a completely unnatural process that humans have to learn. Warner lays some important groundwork in talking about the writer's practice.
But the particularly valuable chapters are those that lay out the different influences that have created a perfect storm of bad writing instruction. Over those seven chapters, Warner helps clarify how these disparate yet interlocking forces brought us to this place. This sad, lumpy place.
Warner runs through seven problems. There's the problem of atmosphere, the way in which schools and a culture of pressure and competition can suck the fun out of learning. There is the problem of surveillance, the ways in which we monitor students closely, often choosing bad proxies in place of more authentic indicators (e.g. attention). The problem of assessment and standardization, the belief in the One Right Answer, which is the very opposite of good writing. The problem of education fads, like grit (here Warner includes a great breakdown of The Hype Cycle). The problem of technology hype-- no, the good writing assessment software that is always "almost here" still has not arrived. The problem of folklore, the received wisdom that is passed along with no evidence but age. And the problem of precarity, which speaks to the lack of stability in a teachers' life, including precarious pay and increasingly senseless and unpredictable means of evaluating the teachers' work.
You may not have thought of all of these as factors in the teaching of writing, but Warner makes a clear case for each. Then he talks about a better framework (my favorite chapter title here: "Making Writing Meaningful by Making Meaningful Writing") and wraps the book up with unanswered questions, those challenges that must be addressed.
This is a great book, clear and concise and accessible. It looks at the big picture of how we got to this place and how to get out of it, which is critical. Writing texts that focus simply on specific techniques and exercises invariably end up tinkering around the edges, because too many teachers are starting from a fundamentally flawed foundation. Not their fault-- it is a foundation that has been built and enforced by outside, non-teachery forces-- but before we can build a better structure, the foundation has to be addressed.
That is not to say that there aren't specific items from the "things you can use in your classroom next week" category, but the book is important for anyone who is interested in growing a world full of better writers, including people who aren't in the classroom. For more specific activities and exercises, I recommend Warner's The Writer's Practice, due in February of 2019.
This is a book we've needed for a while, and now that it's here I recommend you grab a copy.
You may not have thought of all of these as factors in the teaching of writing, but Warner makes a clear case for each. Then he talks about a better framework (my favorite chapter title here: "Making Writing Meaningful by Making Meaningful Writing") and wraps the book up with unanswered questions, those challenges that must be addressed.