I agree with the author on the fact that the “five paragraph essay” does more harm than good. It forces students to follow a template to answer an essay question with little mobility to be creative or show their personality in their writing pieces. Students are taught to craft a thesis statement and answer it within five paragraphs. An alternative to this system would be to use the five paragraph essay as a layout to point students in the right direction and help them understand how much they should write about.