Has the five-paragraph essay, long a staple in school writing curricula, outlived its usefulness? The venerable writing tool has largely fallen out of favor among influential English/language arts ...

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 ...

John Warner has read enough college student essays to diagnose what's wrong with the way Americans write. After 20 years teaching undergraduate writing courses, including a recent stint at the College ...

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 ...

As a graduate student, I once drew a rather bad cartoon of an old schoolmarm (complete with Gary Larson-style beehive) standing in front of a class saying, “And when you finish your five-paragraph ...

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 ...

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 ...