Lauren Lesce, County College of Morris, Randolph, NJ, USA

New to a genre-based approach to writing instruction, I looked forward to delving into the SLWIS’s book club selection Changing Practices for the L2 Writing Classroom: Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay edited by Nigel Caplan and Ann Johns. While I was eager to learn more about different perspectives on the five-paragraph essay (5PE), I wondered how much of what I learned from this text could have an immediate impact on my pedagogy, given that I teach in a “5PE-adopting” program. In this article, I offer three takeaways useful even for those instructors who cannot immediately abandon the 5PE.

Overview

Changing Practices for the L2 Writing Classroom: Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay dispels common myths that promote the 5PE, such as its effectiveness as a scaffold and its usefulness in standardized testing. Authors argue that the 5PE often becomes overgeneralized as the only way to write, but in reality, the 5PE is a form or template that is not appropriate for all writing contexts. Overemphasis on the 5PE leads students to view writing as a formulaic, plug- and-play process. In contrast, effective writing instruction teaches students to understand that the decisions a writer makes depend on genre, context, purpose, and audience. Changing Practices for the L2 Writing Classroom: Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay offers strategies to implement a genre-based pedagogy in K-12, undergraduate, and graduate contexts.

1. Situate the 5PE

If you must teach the 5PE because of program or departmental requirements, you can adjust your practices to do so more effectively. First, it is essential to understand what the 5PE is and what it is not. Many writing instructors praise the 5PE for being a foundational way of teaching students to structure writing by creating and supporting a thesis statement within the introduction-body-conclusion format. However, many L2 writing scholars, including the authors of this book, agree that the 5PE itself is not a genre; it is a structure or template. Genres, like lab reports, abstracts, or product reviews, have a shared communicative purpose and an audience, while forms or templates do not (Tardy, 2019). In other words, the 5PE tells us how information will be organized and presented (e.g., thesis statement, body paragraphs with topic sentences) but does not inherently carry with it a consistent purpose or audience. Therefore, if you must teach writing using the 5PE, discuss with students the difference between genre and structure or form. Explore and read a variety of genres with students and analyze where the 5PE structure may be appropriate and where it is not. Most importantly, avoid presenting the 5PE as the only type of writing assignment--this will confuse students as they continue on to their disciplines, where they may never see a 5PE again.

2. Teach students to identify the purpose of a writing assignment

Second, if the 5PE is required in your curriculum, you can still teach students to identify various purposes for writing. Silvia Pessoa and Thomas Mitchell (2019), the authors of the chapter on preparing undergraduates for disciplinary writing, encourage university writing instructors to teach students to identify if a writing assignment asks for knowledge display, that is, showing what you know, or knowledge transformation, that is, analyzing information in order to create an original argument. They further explain that knowledge display requires description, while knowledge transformation requires analysis and argument. From a rhetorical standpoint, description, analysis, and argument require different language features to successfully complete the task. Therefore, we should encourage students, even when writing a 5PE, to ask questions like: Does this assignment require me to display or transform knowledge? Do I need to describe, analyze, or argue? What language features will I need to successfully complete the writing task?

Teaching students how to identify the purpose of an assignment can help them realize that there are various purposes for writing. Students should know they are not simply a 5PE for the sake of a 5PE. In other words, staying faithful to the 5PE form is not a purpose for writing; analyzing or describing is a purpose for writing. Students that can ask the right questions about an assignment’s purpose will more successfully navigate the wide range of writing assignments required at the college level.

3. Start small and share your successes

Last, look for ways to incorporate small or ungraded genre-based writing activities into your course if you are not able to scrap the 5PE entirely from your curriculum. For example, a lesson on email writing can introduce students to the genre of emails and provide for a rich textual analysis. Discussing the differences between an email and a text message, for instance, raises genre awareness and forces students to consider audience, purpose, structure, and language features. Another genre-based writing task could be writing resumes or LinkedIn profiles. Genres related to job searching can be valuable genres for exploration because they are high stakes and have very specific purposes, audiences, and structures (Feak, 2019). Genre-based tasks like writing an email or a LinkedIn profile can begin to build students’ genre awareness without derailing you from a prescribed curriculum you may have to follow.

When you find success with genre-based writing tasks, be sure to share them with your colleagues! Sharing the successes and benefits of genre-based writing tasks can allow colleagues to feel more comfortable moving away from the 5PE (Johns & Caplan, 2019). This would allow your moves toward a genre-based pedagogy, however small they may be, to gain momentum.

In sum, good writing is contextualized and fulfills its purpose “through choices of genre, content, organization, and language that defy over-generalization or rigid attention to formulae” (Johns & Caplan, 2019, p. 222). The 5PE, on the other hand, is an organizational template that does not suit all contexts or purposes. It is not widely used across university level writing, nor is it a requirement for strong performance on standardized tests. Some view it as an effective scaffold, but it becomes one that is not often released to make way for more sophisticated, less formulaic writing. Despite its ineffectiveness, many programs continue to require the 5PE as its main form of writing and assessment. Even for instructors who must teach the 5PE, it is possible to frame it in a way that effectively prepares students for college level writing in a variety of disciplines. Understanding the 5PE as a form, not a genre, allows writing instructors to help students see that writing can have a variety of purposes and require a different presentation and use of information.

References

Feak, C. (2019). Writing for Disciplinary Communities. In N. A. Caplan & A. M. Johns (Eds.), Changing practices for the L2 writing classroom: Moving beyond the five-paragraph essay (pp. 178-199). University of Michigan Press.

Johns, A., & Caplan, N. (2019). Conclusion: Where do we go from here? In N. A. Caplan & A. M. Johns (Eds.), Changing practices for the L2 writing classroom: Moving beyond the five-paragraph essay (pp. 221-233). University of Michigan Press.

Pessoa, S., & Mitchell, T. D. (2019). Preparing students to write in the disciplines. In N. A. Caplan & A. M. Johns (Eds.), Changing practices for the L2 writing classroom: Moving beyond the five-paragraph essay (pp. 150-177). University of Michigan Press.

Tardy, C. M. (2019). Is the five-paragraph essay a genre? In N. A. Caplan & A. M. Johns (Eds.), Changing practices for the L2 writing classroom: Moving beyond the five-paragraph essay (pp. 24-41). University of Michigan Press.