The Five-Fold Menace: On American Writing Education
A blackboard in a library, uploaded to wikimedia commons by user Daniellemichel and used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
We’ve been behind the 8-ball here at Broken Hands Media for a bit – we’ve all been working too much, and the heat has just now decided to break. So, since I’ve been thinking about it a lot – thank my students for this – I want to talk about academic writing. I will admit, the following screed is a bit of a rough draft for a brief lecture that I intend to give my students at one point or another. As such, let’s call this a Pirating College entry.
No, I’m not going to be talking about how it’s obtuse and hard to follow and needs to be deboned so that the average person can read it. Frankly, I find that insulting to the average person: specialized topics often require specialized jargon to fully discuss.
Everytime I try to say something clever or insightful about language, James Baldwin got there first. Usually with that one quote.
On that note, There’s that old chestnut about how the Inuit (usually framed, improperly, as the “eskimo”) have some absurdly high number of words for snow. I may have mentioned this before, but it’s frankly bullshit. Leaving aside the fact that the languages of the indigenous people of the arctic circle are usually highly synthetic, packing a whole sentence’s worth of meaning into a single utterance, it’s not how synonyms actually work: they have words for dozens of different kinds of snow, because differentiating between freshly-fallen snow and hard-packed snow and wind-driven snow and melted and refrozen snow are matters of life and death for people who live in snow-filled environments. As James Baldwin wrote: “language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.”
Which is to say, language develops the ability to speak about what its speakers need to talk about. And sometimes, speakers need to talk about reification and hegemony and jouissance and problematics. The real issue is finding clear explanations of what these words mean. I usually just break this down to saying “synonyms don’t exist” and pointing out that you imagine different things when talking about a box and a crate, because I used to work in package delivery and one of those is clearly made out of wood.
No, what I want to talk about is something at once easier to think about and harder – easier, because it’s easy to communicate why it’s wrong and harder because it’s so basic that no one thinks about it. The worst thing that was ever baked into the American education system is the idea of the five-paragraph essay.
Weirdly, if you get on google image search for “five paragraph essays”, you find a whole bunch of hamburger-based diagrams.
I’m sure that nine-tenths of the people reading this have written one. This is the standard blueprint used by English classes in high school: a student is taught to write a paragraph of some five-to-eight sentences, and then arrange them into a constellation of five paragraphs. One to introduce, three to carry the argument, and one to conclude.
To be completely frank, more worthwhile ideas have been communicated in old-fashioned 140-letter tweets than in a five paragraph paper. Largely because it imposes an inflexible geography upon the thoughts being communicated, and prevents the formation of subsidiary points or for these points to be fully developed in such a situation as they do form. It exists because it makes an essay function like a mass-produced machine, and the idea is that you can easily swap out one portion of it for another.
Except writing doesn’t work like that.
You can’t simply take a well-thought out argument and trade out a paragraph that says “yes” to an idea for one that says “no” to the same. The evidence, if it is ambiguous enough to support such a move, does not support either position. Not without some pretty drastic reframing and reinterpretation.
Every semester, one of the first things I tell my students before they hand in a paper, is to have any number of paragraphs other than five. Sadly, this results (quite often) in receiving one-paragraph papers that match the word- or page-count requirements, when students listen to the instruction at all. Quite often I get a few who panic and turn in five-paragraph papers anyway.
Some of these educators have clearly never seen a hamburger.
Let’s review. If a paper is made up of five equivalent paragraphs, that means that each paragraph is roughly 20% of the final product. This means that 40% of it is eaten up by the introduction and conclusion, leaving only 60% for the argument itself – and most students cannot write a solid introduction or conclusion to save their life (which it is my job to help them with, but I can’t do that if they don’t have an argument to introduce or conclude.)
So, if each major paragraph is 20% of the total, and these paragraphs are meant to be 5-8 sentences long, then that means that each sentence is 4% of the total at best and 2.5% at worst. Given that in my classes, I need their papers to be 1,250 words to make the required word count for the semester, that means that the average sentence length is going to be 41 words.
Do you have any idea how long forty one words is, on the actual page? It’s of such an incredible and unwieldy length, such an inconvenient and bulky mass, that the mind simply quavers trying to stretch out a thought to fit its vast territory: point of fact, this current, ugly sentence is fully forty-one words.
Okay, I’m not immune to food-based metaphors, but the hamburger thing is weird. Image taken from wikihow.
This is the point of failure for American writing education: it simply produced bad writers. The reason it does this is because it treats writing as something where requirements are meant to be filled, as if lining up all of the ingredients of a cake on the counter were the same thing as baking.
Instead, what people who actually know how to write are doing is applying a series of processes to achieve a set goal. These processes might include such artistic moves as setting a scene, or narrating action, or laying out dialogue, or they may be such technical moves as conducting a literature review or buttressing an argument with quotes, or synthesizing disparate information and proposing working definitions and interpretations.
That prior sentence, I would like to note, is forty-six words. It is more functional than the forty-one word sentence above because it is designed to achieve a goal – laying out skills that different writers might need in different situations – instead of simply building length for the sake of building length.
In American education, we treat writing as something that can be made into a game of quantities and numbers, because those are the only tools we have to understand what a student is doing. However, no one taught the simple paint-by-numbers system of writing that is favored in the high school English classroom has succeeded as a writer because they were taught that system. They may have succeeded, but they did so by their own simple intuition, and that’s a bad thing: when you get down to it, writing is a skill like any other.
It is perhaps more complicated than changing a tire, but the basics that your average person needs to know aren’t much more complicated than changing a tire. The fact that many people hate doing this activity is largely because they were poorly taught. Which, I would like to emphasize, is not the fault of the teachers, but the fault of the administrators and bureaucrats who decided that writing education needed to be standardized.
Think, instead, about what you need different parts to do. Image taken from all about circuits.
Now that I’ve gotten through the screed, let me tell you how to properly handle the issue, at least at root. When you are writing, you should change paragraphs not at certain preset points, but only when you need to – sometimes this will lead to a long paragraph (which slows the reader and dilates time in narrative) or a short one (which speeds up the reader in general and contracts time in narrative). The points where you need to are as follows: when the speaker changes, when the topic changes, when the setting (time and/or place, including from general to specific and vice versa) changes.
Do not follow a recipe, let the function you are fulfilling be your guide: If you do so, you will reach your goal in a relaxed and assured fashion.