Discovering Ideas

This early in the semester, it can be a little confusing to know just how to understand some of the information you get.  It seems to be helpful if I tell students right at the beginning not only what the course is, but what it isn't.  So the following are a few points that may help to clarify how this class will be different from other English classes you may have had in the past or different from your expectations, based on what you have heard from others.

1.  In this class, we will not write five-paragraph essays.  In some of your past English classes, you may have been asked to write an essay with an introductory paragraph, a concluding paragraph, and three body paragraphs.  Or perhaps it was presented as a minimum of three body paragraphs.  You won't do that in this class.  Don't try. 

Did anyone ever explain to you why five paragraphs?  If you look at the opinion page of any newspaper or the columns in any magazine, you will have a very hard time finding a five-paragraph essay.  Indeed, you will have a very hard time finding a five-paragraph essay published anywhere.  That is because the format is too brief to present and defend a significant idea.  Why are students in school still sometimes asked to write five-paragraph essays?  In some cases, out of habit, "because we've always done it that way."  But there is a deeper reason.  The introductory and concluding paragraphs are obviously necessary.  Why three body paragraphs?  Because three is the smallest number of paragraphs that require some organizing pattern.  If you only have two body paragraph, you only have two choices in terms of how to sequence them--A-B or B-A--and it is usually either obvious or inconsequential.  With three paragraphs, you have to have some reason for putting them in the order you do, hence you can be said to have a pattern of organization: chronological (time order), spatial, cause-and-effect, importance--some reason for putting the paragraphs in a certain order.  So the three paragraphs is to make sure that student writers are challenged to think a little bit about the organization of the essay.

But why only three?  So the teacher doesn't have to read any more.  Basically, the five-paragraph format was developed to keep essays short so that teachers didn't have to read too much.  It is a format designed for teachers, not students.  And so it is a format that real writers hardly ever use in the real world, because almost anything worth writing about requires more than five paragraphs to handle well.

Notice that the minimum length for your essays here is 1,500 words.  If you were to write a 1,500 word, five-paragraph essay, your average paragraph would be 300 words long.  And if, as usually happens, some paragraphs are shorter than others, you could easily have a paragraph of 400 or 500 words.  It's very hard to keep a paragraph that long together.  (The paragraph following this one, the longest on this page, is 223 words long.)  If you are writing to communicate, you will usually break a paragraph that gets that long down into smaller units.  But if you think you are supposed to write a five-paragraph essay you will tend to pack in more and more words until your paragraphs get rambling and hard to follow.  Don't do it.  Don't even try to write a five-paragraph essay.

2.  We will not write summary thesis statements with three parts.  One thing you may have learned in an earlier class was to write a thesis statement that stated a topic and then divided the topic into three parts.  For example, if you were writing about AIDS you might write "We can fight AIDS through prevention, treatment, and research."  If you were writing about teaching ethics in schools you might write "Teaching ethics in schools has economic, social, and cultural advantages."  Neither of these is really a thesis statement.  As we will discuss at some length later, a thesis statement expresses the point of an essay, what it all leads up to.  What we have in the examples above are sentences that state a topic and then divide the topic into sub-topics.  But they don't say where the discussion leads, what the reader should end up thinking in the end, what the point is.  Very often these kinds of outline or summary thesis statements are easier to write.  You can produce a "thesis statement" without ever deciding what you want to say or where you want the essay to go.  But they give a false sense of security and lead to unfinished essays.  By the way, the three-sub-point organization comes from the five-paragraph essay.  It doesn't work well for a longer essay.

3.  We will not necessarily put the thesis statement in the first paragraph of our essays.  If your thesis statement expresses the main point of your whole essay, do you want to put it in the first paragraph?  Sometimes you do, but sometimes it's clear that that would be a bad idea.  If, for example, you are writing about a very controversial topic, you probably don't want to reveal your conclusion at the very beginning; if you do so you risk turning off those readers who tend to disagree with you before you even get to defend your position.  You'd be better off in a case like this giving your reasons before you state your conclusion.  So why have so many students been taught to always put the thesis in the first paragraph?

There are two reasons, I think.  One is that if you are going to write an essay in one sitting, in class say, then it's easier to do it if you have your thesis in front of you at the very beginning.  So if you are writing an essay exam, that might be a good idea.  But if you are going to write a serious essay that you want people to really read, you'd be crazy to write it at one sitting.  You would write a draft, go back and revise it, get feedback, revise again.  The process should take at least several days.  This course is, more than anything else, a course in revision.  We will work all semester on how to think through and rethink what we are saying to make it clear and forceful.  So writing an essay at one sitting is, under normal circumstance, a really bad idea.  If you took English 50, you did it in English 50, but you won't do it--you certainly shouldn't do it--in English 100.

The second reason why some students are taught to put the thesis in the first paragraph is that it makes the essay easier for the teacher to grade.  If the teacher has a list of the main points at the beginning, he or she can easily check to see if those points really get written about.  Again, this rule is designed for teachers, not students, and certainly not for real readers in the real world.

Of course, sometimes it makes good sense to put the thesis in the first paragraph.  You have that option.  But nobody is telling you to do it.  Like everything else about real writing, it's your decision.

There are, of course, other things we won't do in this class, but those three are the main things that students tend to get confused about.  Many students have learned to write to artificial formulas that have nothing to do with communication.  What counts in the essays you will write is the thought and the evidence and the communication.  How well can you get others to believe or understand what you believe or understand?  No formula will tell you how to do that. 

Discovering Ideas
Palomar College
jtagg@palomar.edu
This page was last edited: 01/05/09