Five-Paragraph Essay Guidelines
Discovering Shape
Good writers know that they often discover the shape their writing should take during the planning stages. While they are gathering material to use in their writing, they may discover that much of what they are finding illustrates one single point, so they determine to organize their writing around a list of illustrations. Or they find that they are really looking at a process which accounts for how something happened, so they decide to organize their material as a process.
Often writers don't have time to plan. Take the typical essay test for instance. However much you study, usually the questions are something of a surprise. You read the question and in a short time you have to plan and develop an essay. You may not have time to ponder what you can do to answer the question. When this happens it's good to know a basic shape you can use. The five-paragraph essay is one of those arbitrary "shapes" you can impose on your material.
The Basic Shape
You are probably already familiar with the basic shape of the five-paragraph essay which has an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. The introduction, like all introductions, will make some sort of appeal to the reader to invite him or her to continue reading: It may tell a startling story, offer a statistic, make an observation, offer an opinion, etc. The last sentence of the introduction is the topic or thesis sentence which introduced three points that the essay will talk about. The three middle paragraphs than discuss each of these points in the order they were mentioned in the topic/thesis sentence. The final paragraph typically restates the topic/thesis sentence, usually in somewhat different words for variety's sake, and finishes with a final thought, which may be an additional observation, an invitation for the reader to do something, a prediction about what will happen, or something like that.
Example of a Five Paragraph Outline
| Introduction | Describe a medieval gothic cathedral.. |
| Thesis | Because most medieval peasants could not read, the gothic cathedral served as a visual Bible because it inspired men to look heavenward, it made efficient use of colorful light as a symbol of God's spirit, and it employed numerous architectural symbols which were visual reminders of spiritual concepts. |
| Point 1 | The gothic cathedral served as a visual Bible because it inspired men to look heavenward. |
| Point 2 | The gothic cathedral served as a visual Bible because it made efficient use of colorful light as a symbol of God's spirit. |
| Point 3 | The gothic cathedral served as a visual Bible because it employed numerous architectural symbols which were visual reminders of spiritual concepts. |
| Conclusion | Suggest that the reader visit the Washington National Cathedral to look for these symbols personally. |
A Word of Caution
The five-paragraph essay doesn't work right for every instance. Sometimes you have only one good point to make, not three. If you insist on using the five-paragraph essay you may force yourself to come up with two additional, weaker points, just to fill in. Or you may have more than three good points, so leave out several of the good ones, or you combine them in such a way that you don't do an effective job of developing them. Finally, some material just requires a different form or organization. If you are writing an argument, you may have to put together several arguments in a way that doesn't fit naturally with this form.
Use this structure to develop any essay that you need to write, but be aware of its limitations and always consider what other strategy might be equally effective. If you have questions, you can contact me at closserb@andrews.edu