The forever undead five-paragraph essay

Close your eyes. Picture one of your middle school English teachers handing you a sheet of paper to prepare for an upcoming essay. It has a series of fill-in-the-blank lines that you’ve seen before, adding up to a series of five short paragraphs.

With me? Cool. Now let’s crumple that handout, throw it in a metal waste bin, and light it on fire.

The thing is, the five paragraph essay model has been in use for at least most of a century, and versions of it for probably several centuries longer. Most of us have been drilled to death in the use of this tool, and probably even have had teachers that refused to accept anything else. But it’s ultimately only useful for some things–and those probably don’t include your business writing.

Having worked in education myself, I know this kind of template has real benefits for helping students understand the expected shape of an assignment, and for narrowing focus to skills like idea generation and comprehensible communication. But that’s about where the usefulness stops: in setting aside more complex writing concerns to help with skill scaffolding.

When we start to dig into the foundations of writing–and, more broadly, communication–it’s easy to see how the five paragraph structure came from Aristotle’s Classical Argument: the basic components sure look the same at first glance. And why argue with a classic that’s worked so well for long? Well, what’s lacking in most approaches to the five paragraph structure is the contextualization that’s central to Aristotle’s approach.

The structure is part of it, but writing isn’t, ultimately, a machine: we can’t just line up parts in an order and expect them to work the same every time. Communication is always a connection between people, and that requires understanding your audience and what you’re hoping to achieve with them.

Letting go of the reductive five paragraph essay and, instead, using it as a starting place for organizing your ideas and making the room to consider your reader’s needs–that’s a much more efficient and effective option.