A short play, written by me:

Dramatis personae

2 STUDENTS, both in an Honors-level English class

 The students are working on an essay assignment, complete with an outline and rubric requiring such things as “topic sentence for each paragraph,” “three pieces of evidence for each point raised,” &c.  The outline must be filled in to get credit for the assignment.  The outline is three pages long.

STUDENT 1: What theme did you pick?

STUDENT 2: Striving for your goal.  It’s the easiest one.

STUDENT 1:  Friendship and loyalty.  It’s hard.  Hopefully she won’t collect this today.

They type.

I wish I’d made this up.  Here’s an Honors-level English class at a prominent high school, and here are students writing fill-in-the-blank essays about themes that they picked off a list.

In the comments to an earlier post, Damian and I went back and forth about the relative value of teaching essays with a preordained structure.  My thinking’s moved beyond that debate.  I wrote, in a comment, this:

What if I grant that and then move on to the position that essays themselves might not be worth teaching? Because who ever has to write an essay once they’re out of school? I wonder, sometimes, if we’re teaching the English/Social Studies equivalent of pinch pots.

And here’s some more stuff from the National Writing Project.  Trinh Nguyen, a first-year college student, wrote an advisory piece to students about to enter college, warning them about the kinds of writing to expect:

“Do not write a five paragraph essay. Not all paragraphs have to be the same size. Topic sentences don’t always have to be at the beginning of each paragraph.” These words from my professor, Gail Offen-Brown, completely shocked me on my first day of College Writing R1A. Her words contradicted everything I learned in high school: every essay required the traditional five paragraphs with six to eight sentences in each paragraph. Topic sentences needed to be at the beginning of the paragraphs—all of which were now thrown out the window. I struggled to adjust to this new form of unconventional writing.

And here’s something else, from Glenda Moss:

…I heard a freshman English teacher at Stephen F. Austin State University express concern that, since students have been “drilled” on the five-paragraph theme for the state test of academic skills, they were locked into only one way of writing an essay. I now remembered how, when students arrived in my seventh grade classroom, they had already had it ingrained in them that for the state test they were to write five paragraphs: an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Each body paragraph was to have an opening sentence and at least two details to support the opening sentence. Part of our job as seventh grade teachers was to make sure the students could write descriptive, instructive, comparative, and persuasive essays. Following instructional material provided to us, they wrote the essays that generally ended up as five-paragraph themes.  

“Our bad,” say middle and high school English and social studies teachers nationwide.  “We really messed that one up.”

So maybe it’s not that essays need to go entirely–there’s got to be merit in an exploratory essay a la Montagne or White.  But again, and I’m going to keep saying this until they find a nice quiet place for me, we need to rethink the way we “teach” “writing” so that we actually teach writing.

Oh, and the College Board isn’t necessarily opposed to this.  Results from the class of 2006’s SATs show something pretty interesting w/r/t the essay portion of the test:

Half the essays used the first-person voice. Score differences were slight, with first-person-voice essays averaging a score of 6.9, compared to 7.2 for those not using first-person voice. Only 8 percent of essays were identified as using the typical five-paragraph essay structure.

So only 8% used the five-paragraph essay structure, and students who used the fascistically banned first-person voice didn’t do much worse than those who didn’t?  Interesting.  Very interesting.  I wonder who grades these things and how many of them were trained to look for five paragraph-esque structure and 3rd person writing.

Where’s this all going?  I don’t know.  But there are a hell of a lot of myths about writing out there, and they need to be exploded, and quickly.