We teach writing wrong

I remember when I was assigned one of my first writing assignments in 4th grade. I opened up Word on the family computer to start it, and despite all of the outlines and prep work that we had done in class I just couldn't. I had to call in my mom for help, who at least was able to coerce me to write a few words onto the page. But every sentence was excruciating, and I absolutely hated it — and to top it off, my mom had to criticize what I was writing.

I rebutted, of course, and had to explain to her why I was right.

"Good," she said. "Now write that down."

That was what made writing click for me. Somehow I hadn't really understood that essays are about conveying some argument that you have in your head. I had left class with various outlines, notecards with quotes, and other gizmos and was now trying to figure out how to slot that all together in abstract, completely devoid of the actual substance of what I was arguing. I was trying to figure out what the essay was trying to say rather than what I was trying to say, and writing is all about conveying your own voice. I guess they forgot to teach that part.

The five-paragraph essay

The way that we teach writing is a disgrace, and the five-paragraph essay is an abomination. The word essay, doublet of assay, etymologically means "to try, to attempt"; it is the attempt to prove a nascent idea through the written word. And the thing about ideas, and arguments about ideas, is that they have very little structure. Ideas naturally lead into one another and therefore form a graph, and maybe if we enforce that all ideas must naturally arise from other ideas and that those ideas eventually derive from ideas which arise from postulates, then we can make that graph directed and acyclic. But words on a page are fundamentally linear, so maybe writing is more of a bunch of stringy wisps we grasp at and try to arrange in some comprehensible order. The task of the teacher is to teach students to master the flow and the mechanics of the wisps, and that means trudging through a lot of mishmash garbage at first. And this is a lot harder to teach and to grade than simple rules.

Good writing is when profound ideas are expressed simply, and a good essay is one where the conclusion seems obvious in hindsight. But to get to that point requires a great deal of thinking about the topic, refining the conclusion, and then figuring out to say it. It is very seldom that we know the thesis before we sit down to write; usually we have some semblance of direction but not much else. Even in sitting down to write this blog post, I knew that I needed to express my blistering hatred for the five-paragraph essay, but I don't have a plan for how this is all going to slot together. I believe that the first draft should have no structure at all — the optimal structure will only reveal itself at the end. For the first draft, each sentence should just be a breadcrumb in a train of thought so that the writer can refer back while building the final version.

I see the five-paragraph essay as a bludgeon to enforce that student writing assumes some essay-like shape. The three body paragraphs go here, the three-pronged thesis there, and don't you dare ever place a first-person "I" anywhere. Teaching and grading by these hard-and-fast rules is really easy, and often the low-hanging fruit proves too delectable in producing at least superficially essay-like writing. It is a cheat, though: Enforcing that all essays embody an arbitrary three-pronged form unnecessarily constricts the point that the essay is actually trying to say, and it makes the actual task of writing a good essay harder — the natural flow of ideas just doesn't take that shape, and it's frustrating and difficult to try to force it. We're raising a generation to hate writing, without them ever having understood what writing actually is.