Speaking of Writing

Earlier I mentioned posts by Chris and Cory on writing, and I indicated that I had some pushback and a different idea (among other things). I’m going to resist the temptation to expatiate and go straight to the tl;dr version of my thoughts.

First, I object to the almost universal derogation of the five-paragraph essay — not because I think it’s a good genre in itself, but because it’s a useful introduction to the idea that essays might have any structure whatsoever. I’ve read more essays than I care to remember that amount just to ‘Here’s a bunch of things I read about blurgh!’ with a stream-of-semiconsciousness (lack of) structure and no real thesis except ‘so give me a good mark’. [Now, at this point I should apologise for the dull or tendentious or unimaginative writing that characterises most of the secondary sources in my field; I can’t find fault with anyone whose heart sinks at reading many of the essays, articles, and even books in biblical studies.] For these and for essay-writers who have never really been asked to write anything more complicated than a book report, learning to articulate a thesis; present more than one reason, one bit of evidence for affirming it; identify maybe one drawback to the thesis, and the essayist’s grounds for overriding it; and concluding the whole thing in a way that sums up what has gone before — for such writers, a five paragraph essay can be a revelation. It’s not a goal, it’s a ****ing ladder.

By all means, move on from there to the superior modes of writing Cory advocates. And maybe there are prodigies who can vault over the bottom rung of the ladder. I myself spent five years, maybe more, in HE trying to write like the essayists I admired before my father (a veteran teacher of composition) drew me aside and showed me how his variation on the 5PE could help me clarify my writing and communicate my points more effectively. I was thunderstruck — how had I been getting good marks before, without knowing this? (Huge vocabulary, and high style; when one of the secondary-school teachers suspected [without evidence other than my diction] that I had copied a passage in one of my essays, my teacher from the previous year sent her a note reminding her, ‘Not only does he write like that, he talks like that.’ But it wasn’t till interventions from my father (during my masters-degree studies) and a leader of composition classes (during my doctoral studies) that the penny dropped on how important structure and explicit argument are to good writing. I’d like to help my students attain that satori sooner than I did.

If all they went on to write were conventional 5PEs, that would be disappointing. But one lesson of learning to write a 5PE is that one can control the flow of discourse so as to bring a reader along to buy in to the argument. And once you see an essay as an exercise in persuasion, in seduction, perhaps even in tricking a suspicious reader into agreeing despite themself, vast fresh horizons open up. But I find that way, way, easier once students understand so basic a genre as the 5PE.