IGNORE the five paragraph essay
Earlier this week I typed the sentence: “I don’t like writing when I don’t like what I’m writing.”
Above that sentence was three-quarters of an OK essay I’d written. You may have thought it was fine, but I didn’t like it.
I pounded on the Return key four or five or six times to separate myself from the tepid writing above and I typed the only sentence I was proud of on the document: “I don’t like writing when I don’t like what I’m writing.”
I pressed the Return key again, releasing only when the disgraced essay ascended into the toolbar and disappeared. I felt better with “I don’t like writing when I don’t like what I’m writing” and an empty page below.
Early on I learned–no, not learned, just made my practice– not to delete my writing, even the false starts and scrapped drafts I felt too displeased to ever read again. Even things I liked but couldn’t keep I kept. In college, I never had difficulty meeting a word limit, but I begrudged the hours spent trimming down my essays for submission. Frequently I copy and pasted–never cut–a sentence and then modified it. Then I would compare the two versions and deploy the better one in the body of the piece, keeping the also ran at the bottom of my working draft. These prototype sentences and phrases I preserved, often, not out of utility but some sense of preciousness. Keeping the disarrayed trimmings at the bottom of the document felt like the best testament to my writing process–like showing your work when solving a complex math equation.
I’ve actually not solved many complex math equations.
I was the kind of learner who started the year with the great enthusiasm of freshly sharpened Dixon Ticonderogas and perfectly constructed paper bag book covers. I joyfully sat in the front row of every class taking notes, knowing that if I wrote what I heard it would transform from sound to graphite to memory.
But for all my enthusiasm and naturally giftedness in certain subjects–language arts and social studies primarily–sometime around November the math class would get hard. Because it was November in New England I, along with all of my classmates and most of the teachers, would get a cold. The colds of the early heating months were inevitably stinkin’ bad ones, and I’d miss a few days of school to nest with tissues, tea, and daytime television. Upon my return, I would inevitably struggle to comprehend what I’d missed from handouts. Without the process of real-time note-taking, I couldn’t absorb or retain the missed lesson.
The effect of course is cumulative. In fourth grade I must have been absent for about a week of school, totally missing a unit on angles and compasses. When we moved on to another topic I regained my footing, but sure enough in 10th-grade geometry, my anemic understanding of angles led to a year of confusion. And so moved forever away from math, uninterested in pursuing something I wasn’t good at.
Because the truth is I don’t like not being good at something. “I don’t like writing when I don’t like what I’m writing,” is a very “me” sentence.
While some may take pride in the struggle, I just don’t. Same with exercise. Mantras like “Pain is weakness leaving your body” mean nothing to me. I don’t like pain and I don’t want it in my body in the first place. As a kid, I gave up playing soccer after a few weeks of practice. No amount of orange slices was worth the stabbing pain of too much cold, damp early Saturday morning October air in my lungs. In school, I wondered why in the world I was forced to accept the President’s physical fitness challenge–I knew I couldn’t free climb up a rope or run a mile in a matter of single digit minutes or stretch my fingers past my toes.
There came a discouraging time when even the subjects I was good at I wasn’t good at. After years of 100s and high 90s on vocabulary tests and writing projects, I got a 37% on a ninth-grade grammar test. I actually have a sound grasp of grammar, but struggled to learn the names of concepts of which I felt I had an intrinsic mastery (notice how I didn’t end that sentence in a preposition? Pfft.).
Around this same time, high school language arts class became entirely dominated by the five-paragraph essay.
The five-paragraph essay. How, to this day, I loathe and despise you.
I worked last month with a class of 8th graders in my capacity as a writing coach. We met three times that week as a group to speak about writing in general, as well individually to help develop personal pieces they were preparing to submit for publication.
They didn’t bring up the five-paragraph essay. Our early group conversations involved questions such as: “What makes good writing different from bad writing?” and “How can I increase my word count without just adding filler?” and “How do you get a good vocabulary?”
In eighth grade, I would never have considered asking these questions. I never considered that my own haughty barometer wouldn’t be sufficient to judge the good from the bad, and I always had plenty to say so there was no problem with word counts, and, golly, I saw learning vocab as the absolutely easiest grades to get in school.
Oh can I tell you a short story about vocabulary? Ha, now this is ironic. I’m actually going to grab a couple of paragraphs from that other essay I wrote, the one that I didn’t like. I still think most of that essay is trash but I like this bit so I’m going to bring it in because it has to do with my experience learning new words. Here goes:
I can’t tell you where words end and I begin. Some of my earliest memories are of words. I recall my grandmother driving us to her apartment. I must have been two or three and I was sitting in the front seat, which wasn’t unusual for the time, and I opened the car door, its lack of an automatic lock, also not unusual for the time. I remember my grandmother pulling the car over to the side of the road along a high green field; she looked into my eyes and explained the meaning of the word “secure” and its importance. In my memory, it was the same visit with my grandmother, though I can’t say for certain, that I learned the word “savor” over a small platter of semi-frozen After Eight mint chocolates.
I amassed most of my vocabulary immersively, but of course, some of it came from lists and test preparation at school, though even this more clinical introduction felt satisfying to me. I recall encountering the word “taut” in a fourth-grade vocabulary list. I couldn’t fathom how this word existed and I’d never encountered it. At home later that day my ear caught on the word in the NPR broadcast in the background. It was my first conscious realization of the relationship between knowledge and exposure, namely that what you don’t know you won’t notice.
So yeah, I didn’t have a very helpful answer to the “how do you build a good vocabulary” question since it was mostly: just remember all the words along the way at home in school.
But I’ve mastered the skill of taking a question I can’t quite answer and adapting it to suit the answer I have to give.
My answer to the class about building a good vocabulary went something like this:
“People have this idea that a good vocabulary makes writing better. And sometimes it does. Vocabulary in writing is like ingredients in cooking: the more spices and peppers and herbs and acids and fats that you have on hand, the greater variety of dishes you can prepare, each with greater complexity of flavor.
“But, for the most part, what we like to cook most is what we like to eat most. And what we like to eat most isn’t truffle-oil drizzled sea bass with artichokes swimming in golden caviar. Learn to make a good roast chicken with a little salt, pepper, and butter rubbed on the skin and a lemon up the butt.
“Let me put it a different way,” I went on. “There are words that are like truffle oil and golden caviar–“insouciant” comes to mind. And while you should know that word enough to consume it when someone else serves it, you don’t need to keep it on hand for your own concoctions. People are going to say to you ‘Don’t use the verb to be when you write,’” the class laughed and looked over pointedly and their teacher. She tossed her hands up in a mea culpa.
I continued, “Well to that advice I suggest you consider to be to be like salt. You absolutely can overuse salt, but it’s essential to tender, flavorful cooking of absolutely any culinary culture. You’re not failing when you salt your writing with to be, so long as you ensure there are other flavors you incorporate.”
I realize that as fourteen-year-olds none of these kids can cook chicken or sea bass, but the metaphor seemed to work.
Back to the five-paragraph essay.
In our third and final conversation, they asked what writing advice I have for them as they head towards high school and beyond. As I say, none of them mentioned the five-paragraph essay, but I did.
“Fuck the five-paragraph essay,” I said. They laughed. The teacher laughed. I was sincere.
“Look, in high school, the primary mode of writing you’re going to be taught is the five-paragraph essay. And you’ve got to do it, and that’s a fact, but it’s dumb, and that’s a fact. I was once assigned a five-paragraph essay to propose what sport my school should add to its athletics department. Twenty years later I still remember the disgust I felt at that prompt. With no sports I loved, let alone could advocate for, I attempted to take the question I couldn’t quite answer and adapt it to suit the answer I could care about, namely, 19th-century British literature. Which is to say I wrote a five-paragraph essay trying to justify adding fencing to my school’s athletic department.
“However, my argument– spread over an introduction, three paragraphs of “evidence,” and a conclusion–that sword play was culturally relevant, relatively low cost, and provides a more gentile outlet for teenage angst than football or wrestling, resulted in being my teacher holding me behind at lunch. I realized, then, that there is no place in the five-paragraph essay structure to insert your tongue into your cheek.
“So, this is my advice as you head towards high school and beyond,” I shifted in my chair, appreciating how this small group of kindred spirits had reacted just the way my English teacher didn’t to my proposal about fencing and wished we were in a room together instead of over Zoom. “Realize that your teacher needs to see you can do the dumb five-paragraph essay. Once you show you can do it, you’ll be released from it. So just do it. Write the equivalent of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Get the grade and move on, throw that soggy sandwich in the trash, and know that you just had to do that for high school.
“Because, in reality, no one is persuaded by a five-paragraph essay. It’s an awful thing that we ask young people decade after decade to buy into the performance of something they can tell is worthless.
“So what I ask of you is to not give up on writing because of the five-paragraph essay. The world needs persuasive, creative advocates. Embrace the role of emotion and storytelling in persuasion. Extend generosity to your audience; assume the best of them. Be vulnerable and sincere. And keep writing.”
//
Recently news of a brutal school shooting came across the news. I don’t know when you’re listening to this, but chances are a brutal school shooting just happened. It’s the kind of relevance enjoyed by few other topics. Anyway, a few months ago, I’d written a piece about school shootings and my frustration with my elected representatives not responding. I think it’s a good piece, the opposite of “I don’t like writing when I don’t like what I’m writing.”
I submitted the piece to the New York Times for consideration as a guest essay, formerly known as an Op-Ed. I knew it was unlikely to run given the quality and volume of submissions they receive from individuals of a high public profile. But as I always say at the beginning of this podcast, I want the words I write to be witnessed, and I was proud of the words I wrote in that piece. Of course, the original piece exceeded the word count, so I had to trim it down. As you know, I never delete my writing so I copied the piece into a new document and shaved off a few hundred words. I submitted the revised piece and felt, well, peace.
I still can’t free climb a rope or run for a mile or touch my toes or write a five-paragraph essay about sports. But I noticed that for this issue–the effect of perpetual worry about gun violence and frustration that letters to Senators go ignored and fear that the writing of mine that will be published will be an obituary of my school-aged child–for this issue, putting myself out there, competing in an arena where even in my strongest skill set I might not be perceived as good enough, it was worth it. Because I love writing when I love what I am writing.
At the time of submission, an automated email advised me that due to the volume of submissions they often do not respond unless they are accepting a piece.
I was surprised however when today, in the middle of writing this essay, I received an email from the New York Times Op-Ed department.
It was a rejection–they didn’t have space for my piece. But they said they’d read it.
I put my phone down and brought my hands back to this keyboard, glad that I’d sent it to them, glad that I didn’t stop writing after my disastrous encounter with the five paragraph essay or even after that mediocre first essay I wrote earlier in the week, and glad to write every week for you.