The Short But Happy Life of the Five-Paragraph Essay
My Five Paragraph Story
I learned to write a five-paragraph essay in middle school. In my senior year of high school, however, I mastered it. It snapped into place like a puzzle that became a gestalt.
My senior year English teacher strides into class in his immaculate suit, white starched shirt with perfectly knotted tie, gleaming black shoes reflecting the fluorescent lights, gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. He speaks with an academic's measured cadence, each word chosen deliberately as if delivering an object lesson in proper academic English. What drew me to him was his kindness, the joy he derived from teaching. Unlike some teachers, he didn’t make sarcastic comments or try to embarrass anyone. He worked hard to teach us.
I watch him write paragraphs onto the blackboard, his impeccable handwriting never making the chalk screech like a trapped animal. His fingers are always dusted white like mine when I eat powdered donuts. I remember his garden essay, among the first he wrote for us impromptu on the board—always impromptu. At one end of the chalkboard is the introduction naming the topic, saying something interesting about gardens to the degree possible, then stating the thesis. Gardening offers three special challenges for the gardener: planting the vegetables, tending the vegetables, harvesting the vegetables, conclusion. Next to the intro comes the paragraph on planting, then the tending paragraph in the middle of the board, then the harvest paragraph with just enough room on the board to fit with space left over for the conclusion.
Then he underlines the thesis and circles the three paragraph topic words. As if that wasn’t enough, he circles the each topic word in its topic sentence and draws arrows connecting them to the thesis statement. I saw it all in a flash—the proverbial snap when knowledge penetrates—and started cranking out these essays on my own when I was bored on Sundays. They were fun! Yet, even then, the artificiality struck me—it seemed more like a card trick than a poem.
I was writing a lot of poetry at the time.
Three Scoops and a Cone
Structure itself doesn't usually bother me whether I’m doing so-called creative writing or academic writing. Functional academic structures have been a godsend because they serve genuine communicative purposes. Research articles incorporate literature reviews because scholars need context—anyone offering original research in a context of peer review ought to contextualize the study in the research to clarify its contribution to the field. Methodology sections exist because scientific inquiry demands transparency. How did the researchers come to get the evidence? How did they analyze it? These structures grow organically from task needs.
The five-paragraph essay is the poster child for form divorced from function—an empty ice cream cone waiting for any flavor to fill it with three tasty scoops, a conclusion as a napkin. The container matters more than the content when it comes to the eating—it’s always sort of sad when a scoop rolls off onto the sidewalk. When AI systems now churn out these same tired formulaic cones with simulated chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, I recognize the same blandness, the same rigid architecture signifying nothing beyond its own existence. Like my high school teacher popping out five-paragraph essays on demand—gardening, fixing a flat tire on a bicycle, three different types of strokes in the swimming pool—even when AI output is compelling and interesting, you wouldn’t know it by reading the output.
What baffles me: Writing teachers walk into classrooms and teach writing vis a vis a form that does not exist. It appears nowhere—not in journalism, literature, business communication, scientific papers, or creative expression. It’s not going to help any disadvantaged learner gain access to the codes of power. It’s like a skateboard marketed as training for riding a motorcyle, offering limited controlled movement while claiming to prepare riders for Interstate 80.
The Staggering Cost of AI Bans
Today's reflexive banning of AI tools in writing classrooms mirrors the five-paragraph dogma—artificial constraints betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of how language works in the world. These prohibitions build new walled gardens around students, cordoning them off from transformative engagement with the most significant language technology revolution of our lifetime.
Each day of AI prohibition sacrifices irreplaceable learning opportunities. Consider what students lose:
First, AI interactions require immediate ethical reasoning when interactions are routinely reported and discussed in the classroom community. Students confronting a bot in a community built on trust among peers must grapple with intentions, values, and context. Should I use AI here? Can I explain this use to my class? to my teacher?This decision demands sophisticated moral reasoning about attribution, originality, and purpose—exactly the ethical reasoning we claim to strengthen in education. When teachers preemptively ban these tools, they evade this crucial ethical decision point, replacing student judgment with authoritarian decree.
Second, prompt engineering develops astonishing metalinguistic awareness. Students crafting effective prompts must analyze communication at its foundations—understanding implied knowledge, recognizing ambiguity, specifying constraints, and articulating goals with precision. This process transforms abstract "writing skills" into concrete communication challenges with immediate feedback. The cognitive demands of prompt writing exceed the complexity of traditional five-paragraph assignments exponentially, requiring students to externalize their thinking processes in ways few educational activities match. Each prompt becomes a linguistic puzzle demanding extraordinary clarity of thought and language.
Third, analyzing AI outputs cultivates unprecedented critical reading abilities. When students interrogate machine-generated text in a community, they naturally develop rhetorical and critical analysis skills that transfer to all reading contexts. They learn to identify patterns, question assumptions, detect biases, evaluate claims, and recognize tone—all while comparing the output against their intentions. This dialectical relationship between human prompt and machine response creates a uniquely powerful space for developing critical consciousness about language itself as a social semiotic system. Students begin noticing linguistic patterns they previously processed unconsciously, accelerating their development as sophisticated readers.
Fourth, determining what to do with AI outputs builds information literacy that transcends any classroom exercise. Students must verify factual claims, translate abstract concepts into specific contexts, identify knowledge gaps requiring further research, and recognize genuinely innovative connections worth pursuing. This process mimics exactly how professional experts navigate information ecosystems in every field. The startling reality: students working with AI tools engage more actively with information evaluation than in conventional research assignments where many simply parrot sources without genuine engagement. There is no need to verify; the student already consulted the horse’s mouth.
Co-Operation in Community
The transformations possible through thoughtful AI integration stun educators who witness its impact on students firsthand in a context of sharing and trust. Students develop metacognitive skills in weeks that traditionally require months or years to cultivate. Students begin recognizing linguistic patterns, understanding how knowledge structures vary between domains, understanding what register means in an instant, and developing sophisticated awareness of the effects of changing audiences and purposes. Most importantly, they engage with writing as authentic communication rather than polished performance, focusing on clarity and impact rather than arbitrary rules and formal structures.
When writing instructors retreat behind the lines of bans and artificial formulas—whether five-paragraph essays or AI prohibitions—they sacrifice sharing and trust for control and thereby call into question the balancing act between student learning and raw compliance. They trade inquiry for compliance and discovery for discipline. Teaching students to write five-paragraph essays or their more sophisticated siblings like argumentative essays prepares students for a world that never existed except in school while denying them tools essential for the world they inhabit. Substituting fear and surveillance for faith in students' capacity with instruction to engage meaningfully with language, simulated and real, in all its messy, complex, evolutionary glory postpones the inevitable transformation and withholds instructional support when it is needed the most.
Having written a book explicitly advocating for "killing" the 5PE and another about how I think we must engage productively with generative AI in teaching writing, including why attempting to ban it is misguided, I agree with much here, but I also find a bit of excess enthusiasm for using LLM outputs to help students develop critical understanding of writing.
For sure, they can be used this way, but I don't see much evidence that doing so is necessarily superior to asking students to engage with actual human writing that has been created out of thought and intention, as opposed to patterns and probabilities.
I'm thinking about the implications of this passage: "Third, analyzing AI outputs cultivates unprecedented critical reading abilities. When students interrogate machine-generated text in a community, they naturally develop rhetorical and critical analysis skills that transfer to all reading contexts. They learn to identify patterns, question assumptions, detect biases, evaluate claims, and recognize tone—all while comparing the output against their intentions. This dialectical relationship between human prompt and machine response creates a uniquely powerful space for developing critical consciousness about language itself as a social semiotic system. Students begin noticing linguistic patterns they previously processed unconsciously, accelerating their development as sophisticated readers."
"Unprecedented critical reading abilities" is surely hyperbole, no? Everything you describe here can be and has been done with writing, and it can be done in ways that include noticing "linguistic patterns" while also requiring students to consider rhetorical intent. (I talk about an exercise I've used for many years to achieve this goal that utilizes a short passage from a David Foster Wallace essay on cruise ships.)
I think you're right that these tools can offer a dynamic lesson in "language," but I believe the more lasting and meaningful engagement for students when it comes to building their writing practices is not just with language, but with ideas, both their own and others. LLMs, as non-thinking, non-feeling, non-experiencing technology has no real capacity for generating ideas, at least not ones that matter, given they are literally disembodied.
I'm not saying that these activities are worthless because I believe they're worthwhile, but I also think it's important to consider their limits, which are real and important.