The author makes good points on why the five-paragraph essay shouldn’t be the primary way we teach students how to write essays. It could lead to a lack of creativity in future writings where students will force themselves to stick with the five-paragraph format because of familiarity. As the author points out, it makes sense to use this format in standardized tests because it makes for easier grading when there is so many students. However, the five-paragraph essay should not be something that we teach students to be a must and required, otherwise they will stick with this format and not be able to play around with other writing styles in an attempt to conform to what they were taught early on.
It is also pointed out that real authors and writers outside of classrooms basically never use the five-paragraph format and that it is only implemented in schools because it keeps everything controlled and stops students from going off on too much of a tangent. When these students enter their first year of college they almost never switch up their styles and end up sticking with the five-paragraphs. The five-paragraph format is something that shouldn’t be how we teach kids to always write from an early age because it halts any creativity or uniqueness in writing. The alternative could be rubrics for writing that don’t require the five-paragraph essay, but only ask for a piece of writing that fulfills the task. The writing would only need to sufficiently answer whatever questions is presented or respond to the given prompt and be correct, without needing the requirement for five-paragraphs.
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I think that to a certain extent, the five-paragraph is effective maybe when applied to different courses as Warner details. but this structure to me becomes an issue when you’re trying to be expressive of your thoughts. Like Warner states, it kind of puts us inside of a box in which we feel trapped and therefore may end up leaving out analysis or productive information from your paper. Personally, when writing five paragraph essays, they wouldn’t come out as strong because I felt limited to fitting all of the information into a certain amount of paragraph, leaving out a lot of the important explanation that would actually be essential to the essay.
I feel like an alternative to 5 paragraphs is just giving the temple of intro-body paragraphs-conclusion, without setting a limit to the number of body paragraphs and/or what each paragraph has to include nor their length, therefore it allows kids to develop their own styles while being flexible. I feel like if teachers have a lot of students then there should be a page limit not really a paragraph limit.