There could be several reasons you feel stuck in the rut of the five-paragraph essay format.

1. You’re obligated by your district to teach it.
2. You feel pressured by standardized testing to teach it.
3. You don’t know how else to teach it in a way that engages your students and addresses their writing needs.

Just to name a few.

Somewhere along the road, we were either told to or felt obligated to teach this structure, and we haven’t broken away from it since.

This has been going on since we were in high school! I remember being shocked by receiving less-than-perfect scores on my early college essays despite following a rigid intro-body-conclusion structure. To be honest, I’m currently wrapping up my Master’s degree and I STILL don’t have a solid writing process… but is that a bad thing?

Let’s look at the positives.

Teachers are pretty good at recognizing the nuances to any instructional approach, and it would ridiculous to say that the five-paragraph essay has no room in secondary English classrooms. So what are the benefits to this writing structure?

It takes us back to the basics.

My first year of teaching, I had a cohort of 10th graders with serious writing deficits. Their first writing assignment, a memoir piece from Kelly Gallagher’s Write Like This, resulted in incoherent papers that minimally followed instructions or any kind of writing structure. Their first analysis papers weren’t much better. And while I was a first-year teacher who’s instruction wasn’t the best, I knew I was missing something. That “something” was the basics. My grade-level team quickly fell back on teaching the five-paragraph essay in chunks to spend more time honing in on the writing components of each paragraph and providing specific feedback and guidance along the entire writing process. Our justification was that using the five-paragraph essay would be easily transferable to their next English classes and expanded upon as they developed their skills. Byung-In Seo defends this need for foundational writing skills by using the metaphor of house construction: Every house is built similarly, with a foundation, walls, roof, etc. before individuality is added in. Students need structure to not only gain skills they may not have yet but also to grow in those skills as they mature academically.

It prepares students for the future.

So many of our students HAVE to participate in some kind of standardized test in their lifetime. While I firmly believe that these tests do not authentically capture a students’ academic skills or “intelligence,” they are a part of secondary education that we can’t ignore. Not helping our students prepare for these tests, even minimally, is doing them an injustice. The five-paragraph essay is a common structure for writing portions on tests, including EOCs and the SAT. Kerri Smith, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, discusses the need for the five-paragraph essay not only in standardized testing like the SAT but also college-level writing: “As a professor of first-year composition, I would be thrilled if, every September, more students could put their ideas together in the coherent fashion demanded by this under-appreciated form because, almost without exception, students who know the five-paragraph essay intimately are more prepared to take on the challenge of college-level writing.”

So it’s clear to me that this writing structure has its place in the world. It’s a safe structure that provides a solid base for writing skills.

Safe. That’s a good word to describe the five-paragraph essay. But sometimes I don’t want my students to be safe. Sometimes I want them to take risks in their writing. Does this structure allow for that?

So what do we do? Tear the house down completely?

Then, students are left with no guidance at all, and I think a lot of us know what kind of nightmare that can lead to.

No. Instead, we add to their house. We build balconies, additional rooms, put up their own wallpaper and curtains. We expand upon the five-paragraph essay and emphasize to students that it is merely a tool in writing, not the end-all-be-all of essay structures.

Thomas E. Nunnally calls for teachers to help students see the true role of the five-paragraph essay: “a helpful but contrived exercise useful in developing solid principals of composition.” With this clearer definition of the five-paragraph essay, one of my favorite phrases is confirmed yet again: You can’t break the rules until you know the rules.

Nunnally encourages teachers to take a stance on emphasizing content over form. By encouraging students to explore all possible solutions to a problem, prompt, or question, teachers are no longer placing form at the top of the writing hierarchy (i.e. Instead of “What three ideas support my thesis?” we ask “What ideas support my thesis?” ).

I read articles like Nunnally’s and Wesley’s and feel equal parts inspiration to teach writing in new ways and discouragement by what a huge task this really is. The five-paragraph essay has been ingrained in our educational systems for so long, it’s going to be a long road ahead of us before we see world-wide changes in how we teach this structure. But I can’t help but think back to something I’ve learned from my previous graduate classes:

A small step forward in your own classroom can create huge ripple effects in your school, community, and so on.

So, as an attempt to break from the torture that is grading these cookie-cutter essays I always seem to get back, I plan on making some changes for next year. Kelly Gallagher offers a different format for essays in Write Like This (Figure 9.1) that still give students the structure they may need, but has the flexibility to encourage critical thinking needed too. With small adjustments in our teaching of this structure, we can open up more opportunities for students to improve their overall writing.

In other words, we can help them build their house.