How to Unlock the 5-Paragraph Essay to Improve Your Writing
By: Lee G. Hornbrook
Tags: Writing Tips, Writing, Essay, Higher Education, Creativity

How to Unlock the 5-Paragraph Essay to Improve Your Writing

Why Beginnings, Middles, and Ends Still Matter in Writing

Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels

I taught the dreaded 5-paragraph thesis essay for 25 years in college. The students hated it. I hated reading their dull, lifeless essays. And yet, we persisted. There is a lesson in writing structure in the 5-paragraph essay, a human need for a beginning, middle, and end.

Success in school is often measured by how well a student writes a 5-paragraph thesis essay. College entrance exams, AP tests, the SAT, ACT, and exit exams in freshman writing classes often use the 5-paragraph thesis essay as the standard-bearer of good writing. Most of you reading this today probably had courses that emphasized the 5-paragraph essay, with its formulaic beginning with thesis statement as last sentence, its three body paragraphs to express three supporting points, and its conclusion focused on restatement of main points.

The 5-paragraph thesis essay is so formulaic that it doesn’t even have to be 5 paragraphs long.

The 5-paragraph thesis essay is so formulaic that it doesn’t even have to be 5 paragraphs long. It could be 20 paragraphs, with a single paragraph introduction, 18 paragraphs for each point to be made (1 point per paragraph), and 1 concluding paragraph. The format is extendable, like a ladder, but not flexible.

For all its faults, the 5-paragraph thesis essay is a perfect fundamental starting point to structuring writing. It is not, however, a model to hold up and worship. On the contrary, many writing theorists will attest to its limitations. But it does emphasize the absolute basics about writing that most of us practice today — a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The limitations of the 5-paragraph essay

I once taught a freshman college student, a young man from western Kansas, who wrote page after page of dull 5-paragraph essays. He was a hard worker, but he was not improving. After 3 essays, we sat down together to analyze his efforts.

Upon closer inspection and in talking with him, I discovered that upon the advice of his high school English teacher, he had employed the most severe 5-paragraph formula I had ever seen. Each essay was no more and no less than 20 sentences long. Each paragraph had four sentences — a topic sentence, a specific discussion point, an example, and a transitional sentence. In the introduction, the transitional sentence was the thesis statement, the overall point of the essay. In the conclusion, the transitional sentence was a concluding statement broadening the point of the whole essay or rounding it out with a clever statement.

In short, my student’s essays lacked development, specific details, life’s blood. It was all skeleton and no flesh. With the 20-sentence formula, there was no room for elaboration, a second (or third or fourth example), a personal anecdote, an insightful quotation.

My student’s essays lacked development, specific details, life’s blood. It was all skeleton and no flesh.

I don’t fault my student for trying what he was taught, nor do I fault his teacher for presenting a formula to prepare students for standardized college entrance exams. But the rigors of college thinking and learning were not suited for such a formulaic 5-paragraph thesis essay. Thought and ideas do not come neatly packaged with only three points. What if an essay idea needed a fourth point? What if a paragraph point needed a second example to help support and illustrate an idea? In the student’s formula, he would not have the opportunity to help his own case.

The origins of the 5-paragraph thesis essay

This story may be apocryphal, but it serves a good point. During graduate school, in my teacher training program, our director explained the origins of the 5-paragraph thesis essay thus: During WWII with the enormous response of men of all stripes volunteering to fight fascism, the drill sergeants needed a method to teach the recruits to get them through basic training and to the front lines as quickly as possible. Recruits came from a great variety of socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, from the very sharp to the very dull-witted. No one who was physically able, however, was turned away.

To teach to the common denominator, the drill sergeants hammered home a three-part structure.

1. Tell them what you are going to tell them.

2. Tell them.

3. Tell them what you told them.

For instance:

1. Today’s lesson is about keeping your helmet on your head, the most important of all your safety gear.

2. Keep your helmet on your head, for it is the most important of all your safety gear.

3. That’s it for your helmet. Remember to keep your helmet on your head to keep your head safe.

In this way, recruits heard the advice three times. In the rush to have recruits learn so much material in such little time, repetition was looked at as a way to get people to remember the most important points. Say something often enough and people will remember it. If even one recruit remembers to keep his helmet on to prevent a fatal injury, the drill sergeant can sleep soundly knowing he did the job as best he could.

Many of these drill sergeants turned into the college professors that filled America’s universities following WWII. They took the theories and ideas they learned from the service and applied them to their own work as writing theorists. And thus, the 5-paragraph thesis essay was born, with its 3-part structure:

Introduction — Tell your readers what you are going to tell them. Body — Tell your readers your main points. Conclusion — Tell your readers what you told them.

Here’s the rub. For all the millions of 5-paragraph thesis essays written by students over the years, this is not a form that occurs in nature. Browse through dozens of Medium articles today and look for a 5-paragraph thesis essay. I defy you to find one. Browse through magazines, such as The New Yorker, National Geographic, Esquire, Vogue, even Time and Newsweek, and you won’t find a 5-paragraph thesis essay there either.

For all the millions of 5-paragraph thesis essays written by students over the years, this is not a form that occurs in nature.

English teachers worth their salt know that the 5-paragraph thesis essay is a starting point for most students, not the goal. With declining literacy rates and skills today, you have to start somewhere. Most teachers want their students to excel beyond the 5-paragraph thesis essay, to learn the fundamental form so that they can escape from that limiting box into something else like a flowering vine that will meander and wind where it will.

The 5-paragraph thesis essay: beginning, middle, and end

Writing needs beginnings, middles, and ends. Human life is organized around this 3-part structure. Childhood / prime of life (adolescence and adulthood) / old age. Or non-working life / working life / retirement — whatever structure you put to it — we are biologically predisposed to see life in this 3-part structure.

This doesn’t mean that every article, every story, every narrative has an overt beginning, middle, and end. Not every story starts with “Once upon a time” or “A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away . . .”

Some of the greatest literary works start famously in medias res, in the middle of things, such as Hamlet, in which Hamlet’s father has already been killed and the plot set firmly in motion. Homer’s Iliad starts with an argument about going to war with Troy, long after the beautiful Greek Helen was kidnapped by Prince Paris of Troy, the action that prompted the war.

Some stories start far before their stated offerings. The great comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is presumably about Tristram’s life, yet the first 150 pages are devoted to philosophical arguments between his father and uncle and various personages and getting Tristram himself born. Thus the “beginning” of this tale is way before the beginning of the main character’s life.

Or to take a more contemporary example, consider the enthralling Christopher Nolan movie Memento, which starts at the end, and evolves backward toward the beginning through the lens of Lenny suffering from short-term amnesia.

So much writing about writing discusses the opening or “the hook,” such as a personal anecdote to lead a reader into the essay. That is the beginning. And then the middle of an essay is the development of the main points, the details, perhaps an enumerated list (usually more than 3 things) with detailed examples of the main ideas. And then the end of the essay is included as a takeaway point, the one thing that you want your readers to remember. Even today, we are bound in so many ways to this 3-part “beginning, middle, and end” structure.

The takeaway

Writing is as much art as craft. The art of writing is hiding the craft from the reader, to hide the scaffolding, the hammer and nails and wooden planks that build the structure, while still offering a beginning, middle, and end. Or to use another metaphor, we clothe our writing so the skeleton doesn’t show. At first, our essays are skin and bones, undernourished adolescent structures. Once we flesh them out, they grow and flourish, and they need new clothes for their new shapes.

So after all, we are all still writing 5-paragraph thesis essays — essays composed of beginnings, middles, and ends, with a point to make, ideas for development, and a take-away point. We just clothe our essays in finer silks than their cousin, the 5-paragraph thesis essay.