The Formuia Essay Reconsidered
Anyone wanting to start an argument among a group of
English teachers has only to ask:
"How do you feel about teaching five-paragraph essays?" Some in the group may smile, but others will be quick to voice disapproval: "They're artificial."
"They suppress individual expression." "They produce lifeless writing."
Those kinds of accusations and more appeared in the most influential writing-theory book of the 1970s: Uptaught, by Ken
MacRorie. A single word from that book—"Engfish"—was widely used to denote phony prose from students forced to write mechanically instead of self-expressively. The word seemed to encapsulate everything that was wrong with writing instruction, and one heard it incessantly in those years during presentations at meetings of the National Council of
Teachers of English, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the
Modern Language Association.
With that, the five-paragraph essay was dead.
And buried, too, apparently.
A quick survey of recent books outlining the history of writing in American schools turns up little or no reference to it. This is surprising since a recent
Google search found 4.5 million occurrences of the term online!
The majority of hits seemed to be from teachers' essay instructions for their classes. Since the technique is a major feature of writing instruction in America, having historians pretend that it doesn't exist seems, well, strange. To their credit, a couple of critics since MacRorie have been willing to debate the subject. For instance Bruce Pirie offers the following criticism:
"What does a five-paragraph essay teach about writing? It teaches that there are rules, cind that those rules take the shape of a preordained form, like a cookie-cutter, into which we can pour ideas and expect them to come out well shaped." He goes on to discredit such essays as being akin to training wheels on bicycles and paint-by-thenumbers kits.
Formulas Help
English teachers has only to ask:
"How do you feel about teaching five-paragraph essays?" Some in the group may smile, but others will be quick to voice disapproval: "They're artificial."
"They suppress individual expression." "They produce lifeless writing."
Those kinds of accusations and more appeared in the most influential writing-theory book of the 1970s: Uptaught, by Ken
MacRorie. A single word from that book—"Engfish"—was widely used to denote phony prose from students forced to write mechanically instead of self-expressively. The word seemed to encapsulate everything that was wrong with writing instruction, and one heard it incessantly in those years during presentations at meetings of the National Council of
Teachers of English, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the
Modern Language Association.
With that, the five-paragraph essay was dead.
And buried, too, apparently.
A quick survey of recent books outlining the history of writing in American schools turns up little or no reference to it. This is surprising since a recent
Google search found 4.5 million occurrences of the term online!
The majority of hits seemed to be from teachers' essay instructions for their classes. Since the technique is a major feature of writing instruction in America, having historians pretend that it doesn't exist seems, well, strange. To their credit, a couple of critics since MacRorie have been willing to debate the subject. For instance Bruce Pirie offers the following criticism:
"What does a five-paragraph essay teach about writing? It teaches that there are rules, cind that those rules take the shape of a preordained form, like a cookie-cutter, into which we can pour ideas and expect them to come out well shaped." He goes on to discredit such essays as being akin to training wheels on bicycles and paint-by-thenumbers kits.
Formulas Help