Creativity in Constraint

In praise of learning the 5 paragraph essay despite ChatGPT (and how to upgrade it)

The Saturday Brunch: a figurative flat white or fizzy to start your weekend

Photo by Marc Pell on Unsplash

Some - even English teachers - are calling for the end of essay assessment in schools due to the rise of AI writing capabilities. As impressive as these computer generated essays are, often better than student writing, it doesn’t mean we should stop teaching the art of the essay.

Nor should we ignore that teaching how to use AI, though it will continue to change greatly over time. Pre-November-2022, an approach may have been applied to spelling and grammar: learn how to spell and learn about grammar; learn how to apply the computer aids effectively. Now, we’re just upping the game.

I guess an essential question of teaching is: how do we get from point a to b? Shortcuts are likely to eschew deeper understanding and perhaps limit the possibilities for the future…for writing, for thinking.

It’s not only students who seek the shortcuts. Some of these practices can feel tedious to teachers, especially when they’re faced with more and more responsibilities regarding online presence and data analysis, for example. It’s reasonable to not want to take the time to make creative and engaging lessons on something so mundane. I get it! So…the answer to this issue is perhaps much more complex and rooted in funding for education. With more money, teachers could have fewer classes or students and have more access to professional development or collaboration time. [They’ll also need to learn how to use and teach AI writing technology.] I digress…but it all comes back to the idea of creativity in constraint. The (five paragraph) essay need not be banal!

Learning the basics of essay writing is essential in helping a young person to not only write more creatively and persuasively but also to think differently and to understand the texts that come before them over the rest of the years of their life in more nuanced ways.

All students use calculators for at least some of their exams, but we still teach them to add, subtract, multiply, divide…and do the really difficult calculus that a computer can easily do for us. Why? So we understand. So we can push our brains in new directions. It’s not only for mathematicians just as essay writing in the age of ChatGPT is not only for professional writers.

I do agree that more creative forms of assessment can be used on exams. Of course, some are already. And when it comes to essays written outside of exam conditions, it may be impossible to know if a computer or student (or tutor or parent…) has written the essay. Just as we can’t easily send a math exam home, we can’t guarantee the authenticity of an essay exam done at home. But this issue in ensuring assessment practices is different from the need for certain skills within the curriculum.

Sorry kids — my stance remains — Long live the five paragraph essay! Read on to understand why I think it’s a lot more than a boring tradition.

---

Creativity in Constraint

Originally published in The Writing Cooperative, April 21, 2022 (Editor: Justin Cox)

How many of you learned the iconic (or infamous) 5 paragraph essay in school? Maybe you learned it as a hamburger model, or by using boxy rectangles to sort out the information in your paragraphs. Did you hate it? Love it? Did your teachers skip over it because they hated it?

The 5 paragraph essay is an anchor you can always go back to. It’s also a springboard or a skeleton from which you can greatly expand. As an author, academic, and former high school English teacher of 20 years, I would like to tell you why I love it and how you can go beyond it.

The key components

Building a stone wall is an art and a skill. You need to understand the way stones can fit together in order to serve their purpose. However, you can also create beauty in the way you select your stones and choose the way they will balance one another until reaching completion. The language and essential components of your essay are like these stones.

A strict 5 paragraph essay has an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. The introduction should have a hook, thesis, short discussion, and preview. Each body paragraph should have ‘Point — Evidence — Explanation’ (PEE paragraphs) or (after, say, 6th grade) ‘Point — Evidence — Explanation — Link — Evidence — Explanation — Link — Evidence — Explanation — Transition’ to upgrade the amount of evidence in your paper. And the conclusion should wrap things up by summarizing your main points, going back to the thesis, and adding something fresh (but connected) at the end. You can see a decent basic overview here.

*You can read an interesting discussion of the thesis by Walter Bowne in The Writing Cooperative.

Start expanding

Once you know the basic components and feel comfortable with them, it’s easy to add on extra paragraphs or evidence to your paper. If you haven’t written in this style, I recommend trying it out, so that you really understand the basics. It’s sort of like learning the five basic foot positions of ballet before dancing or sun salutations before other yoga asanas. I use physical examples here because the goal is to make this writing structure become muscle memory, something you don’t have to explicitly think about as you write.

The structure doesn’t have to be followed while you write good persuasive essays or articles. But it can help you remember the way to make your writing clear and well documented. You can also look at structured ways to expand this coat hanger of an essay. Purdue Owl has a fantastic writing lab with many resources, including basic structures of various essays.

One way you can understand a great expansion of this model is through the work of David Foster Wallace. His essays, while greatly anecdotal and fiercely creative, are aware of and play with the rigid elements of our school-days essay. Even while playing around, he makes his points exceptionally clear and always comes back to evidence in discussion of purpose.

Purposeful editing

When you read back over your own work, it can be useful to keep this structure in mind. For example, I either like to highlight the main points I’m making after freely structuring a piece or begin with the main points and expand from there. It’s a simple task but can help you to see if they are placed effectively and clearly backed up with evidence. They don’t have to be placed in the spots that a 5 paragraph essay structure asks for, but knowing this device of clarity should help you understand when and how it’s effective to break the rules.

I also like to highlight my opening, thesis, and closing ideas. The idea of sandwiching your writing where the ending syncs back to the opening is a way to make it feel complete. Something fresh at the end should bring the work beyond the page or screen, so that the reader keeps thinking about your work and hopefully makes it relevant to themselves. The opening line or paragraph usually has a deep connection to the ending. Often, we write the beginning when we are completely finished to make it as clear and effective as possible. After all, we go through a thinking journey as we write a paper or story.

How can this method possibly be creative?

Creativity in constraint is the idea that our creativity can be pushed through structures and by using structures that exist. Something as basic as a word count can force us to think about the effectiveness of the concise language that we choose. Other structures, such as conventions of genre, are ones that can either be used in formulation or subverted for effect.

Kurt Vonnegut famously discusses plot structure in Cinderella in ‘The Shape of Stories.’ Screenwriters usually adhere to one of several strict structure guidelines to make their films successful.

Essentially, we use structure to help our audience understand our message. The American Press Institute says of journalistic pieces:

If the purpose of journalism is to tell people what they need to know to navigate their way through their world, it follows then that journalists need to keep our audience in the forefront when making decisions about coverage.

Any type of writing attempts to convey a message to the reader. By using conventions for effect, we can better reach people and have a greater impact as writers.

It’s not too late

If you realize now that you haven’t learned this essay model or you’ve completely forgotten it since your SAT test, it’s not too late. Try writing something really basic in this structure, like why it’s good to drink coffee in the morning or the reason XYZ is the best novel you’ve ever read. Highlight the components in different colors. Then, take a longer or more unusually structured article you’ve recently written and try to apply these highlights to it as well. What do you notice? What would you change? When could you use these components during your writing process (during outlining, drafting, or editing)?

Each person writes differently. But we also want our ideas to come across clearly to our readers. Using convention, whether adhering to it strictly or subverting it completely or something in between, can help us to make our writing part of the greater dialogue of literature. We can think about this idea of creativity in constraint for any type of writing convention and genre in more philosophical as well as practical ways.