The word essay derives from the title of a 1580 collection of writings by the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne. In his Essays, Montaigne set down his thoughts on whatever subject snared his ...

Dennis Allen doesn’t think the five-paragraph essay is dead. In the years before his retirement in May from West Virginia University, the Professor Emeritus did not assign “strict” five-paragraph ...

Will AI kill the five-paragraph essay? To find out, I asked my ninth grade English teacher. The five-paragraph essay is a mainstay of high school writing instruction, designed to teach students how to ...

Let’s just go ahead and kill the 5-paragraph essay at all levels, everywhere. Seriously. Let’s end it. We can have essays that happen to be 5-paragraphs long, but there shall be no more “5-paragraph ...

A common teaching tool among English teachers is the five-paragraph essay because it helps students write about any given topic. It’s been the building block of composition classes for decades, and ...

The latter half of Rion Amilcar Scott's outstanding new collection, The World Doesn't Require You, is the brilliant novella "Special Topics in Loneliness Studies," about a college professor at the ...

The five-paragraph essay makes you a more competent human, able to digest, analyze and articulate information with concision and clarity. But fundamentally, I struggled with this. I was a disorganized ...

Regular readers are well-familiar with my campaign to move beyond the teaching of the five-paragraph essay. For this reason, I was thrilled to be introduced to a new book, Changing Practices for the ...

The writer lives in Wayne, Neb., where he teaches high school English. A pliers, hammer and screwdriver may not be the most sophisticated tools in a craftsman’s toolbox, but they are some of the most ...

Reading and writing were always my favorite subjects when I was in school, and I can still remember when I was taught that a proper paragraph had five sentences in it. It was probably around fourth ...

Extended "discourse," such as class presentations or essays written as school assignments, has a particular structure arising from particular expectations and standards. Such structure, expectations, ...