Following
I’m being followed. In each course I take, in the course I teach, in my other reading and research projects, it is there. That silly five-paragraph form just won’t go away. I am currently revising a rather lengthy piece about formulaic writing. Thus I particularly notice when one of our readings deals with the issue of form. As I read Murphy (in Roen) I wondered what most college students think about the five-paragraph essay form. It is common for students to be “drilled” on this form because teachers want to prepare students for high-stakes tests and to prepare students for college writing.
Would it help early on in a semester of English 1000 to survey students on their experiences and views of five-paragraph/formulaic writing? As I study middle-high school teacher comments about the five-paragraph essay, some of them see this as very prescriptive. They do not want to break the rules, and so students may enter college with various notions about the purpose of the form, and to some students the form may be what writing is all about. Murphy brings up two concerns on p. 281 to describe prescribed forms of writing: “a mechanical, stifling, intellectually empty formalism” and a belief “to impressionable student writers that all effective discourse follows certain generic and universal principles of coherence.” On the other hand, Murphy argues for teaching form as a way to be aware of patterns and organization, just not as a prescribed one-size-fits-all approach. In Murphy’s example of Kiera’s paper – she used five-paragraphs. I noticed this recently when I was reading college student applications for a fellows program. The ones I read included five paragraphs. Granted, it is a handy form and good to know for writing-on-demand, but the writer needs choose to write in five paragraphs because that is what makes sense…”the trick is to avoid being either narrow or prescriptive about them.”
If one idea is to find out what students think of form, the other is what Murphy recommends at the end of the article --- Get students reading samples of essays, look at the forms the writers use, and then look at their own writing: “I ask students to identify at least two significant moments of transition in their own papers. What ideas are they moving between? What are the relationships between those ideas? What language do they use to name or signal those relationships to readers?” If Murphy had tried this with the student essay on guilt, what would the student have discovered not just about her writing, but about what she was thinking?
Would it help early on in a semester of English 1000 to survey students on their experiences and views of five-paragraph/formulaic writing? As I study middle-high school teacher comments about the five-paragraph essay, some of them see this as very prescriptive. They do not want to break the rules, and so students may enter college with various notions about the purpose of the form, and to some students the form may be what writing is all about. Murphy brings up two concerns on p. 281 to describe prescribed forms of writing: “a mechanical, stifling, intellectually empty formalism” and a belief “to impressionable student writers that all effective discourse follows certain generic and universal principles of coherence.” On the other hand, Murphy argues for teaching form as a way to be aware of patterns and organization, just not as a prescribed one-size-fits-all approach. In Murphy’s example of Kiera’s paper – she used five-paragraphs. I noticed this recently when I was reading college student applications for a fellows program. The ones I read included five paragraphs. Granted, it is a handy form and good to know for writing-on-demand, but the writer needs choose to write in five paragraphs because that is what makes sense…”the trick is to avoid being either narrow or prescriptive about them.”
If one idea is to find out what students think of form, the other is what Murphy recommends at the end of the article --- Get students reading samples of essays, look at the forms the writers use, and then look at their own writing: “I ask students to identify at least two significant moments of transition in their own papers. What ideas are they moving between? What are the relationships between those ideas? What language do they use to name or signal those relationships to readers?” If Murphy had tried this with the student essay on guilt, what would the student have discovered not just about her writing, but about what she was thinking?
posted by Amy | 2:03 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting stuff -- I'd be very curious to have the cite for the Murphy text. There was some engaging and productive discussion of the five-paragraph theme distributed across a number of weblogs in December 2003 -- I link many of the posts here, where there are also some good comments from John Lovas and others.
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