In Defense of the Five Paragraph Theme

I couldn’t help but notice the “In Defense of the Five Paragraph Theme” article in the newest English Journal. This is the second time in three years. One of my colleagues was giving me a hard time about it because she knows how I loathe the form (though, my College Comp kids are now writing them – well, their own voiceful versions of the five paragraph theme). I guess it is a good sign that the article is there, for it implies that the five paragraph theme needs to be defending, which must mean that it is coming under attack. And that’s a good thing.

I’ll spare my readers another diatribe (hey, that’s the second time I’ve used that word today) on this topic. I’m a broken record when it comes to that. But it got me fired up enough to dig out (well, actually I did a quick search on my MacBook) an old essay I wrote for my first real bonafide graduate level research paper. Initially, the final draft was in a ‘researchy’ format. But I had enough left over that I thought I’d have a little fun with what I had learned and I wrote a familiar essay. The familiar turned out to be better than the research paper. It’s a wonder what voice and personality can do.


A Familiar Essay: A Ride Through the Thesis/Support Patch

I have come to an amusing analogy between an experience I had as a young boy and my current profession as a composition teacher.
In the summer of 1984 my father bought a 160-acre farm ten miles from town, and to my eternal misery, he moved us, which included my father, mother, and me, there. The land on the edges of our new farm was fenced off into alfalfa and wheat fields. The rest was a withering pasture comprised of thirsty grass, vast forests of thistles, and countless craters of striped gopher mounds.
One day in late June, I was helping my dad grease our John Deer "A" before we took it to mow alfalfa, when a strange green truck pulled into our yard. A peculiar little man got out and approached us. He had a long, white beard that would have reached to his waist had it not been so windy. Instead it flowed horizontally from his chin. My dad went to see what he wanted while I quickly finished greasing the tractor.
When I was done, I peered up and noticed my dad leaning against the side of the man's truck with one hand tucked in the lone back pocket of his tattered Levi's. "Yes," I thought. This was promising. Dad was in his "visiting" stance. The man too was propped up against the side of the truck. This had the makings of a real jaw session. As I plotted my escape, I noticed that the driver's side door had a square yellow plaque on it with "State of MN" stenciled on it in square black lettering.
So I crept over to a shed on the other side of the truck, feigning that I was looking for a tube of grease. Had Dad not been so wrapped up in whatever they were talking about, he would have recognized this ploy right away and cast me out to the field to mow. I was in luck. Dad was wholly engrossed in the conversation. It was going to be a real jaw session indeed, for I was able to effortlessly slip around the shed and dash toward the house. Within five minutes I was in a T-shirt and cut off jogging pants, lying on my bed with Def Leppard on the stereo and Stephen King's The Tommyknockers in my hands.
Eventually, Dad beckoned me back to work, and we mowed the 60-acre alfalfa field later that day. Over the clatter of the blades, Dad explained to me that the visitor was the state "weed inspector."
"There's no pot around here!" I shouted over the chugging tractor and the racing blades slicing down the alfalfa.
"No. He inspects wild weeds like . . . " and my dad began rattling off names of plants that I had never heard of before, like "leafy" something and something "spurge" or maybe it was "leafy spurge." Then my dad explained to me that the "weed" inspector also warned him about the thistles. Amidst the withering grass, the thistles battled the gophers for supremacy of our pasture.
I had encountered them several times on my three wheeler. In fact, my favorite thing to do when my friends from town visited was to rev up my three wheeler and take them through a thistle patch. I, of course, would lift my legs up onto the front fender and race through the thick patches. My friends would be caught unaware and scream as the thistles tore and gouged their legs. They would beat on my back and vainly try to raise their legs out of the way. However, that was impossible for they would have to lift their legs up and forward, which would bring them only deeper into the thistles as they whizzed by scraping the gas tank, my friend's legs, and the rear plastic fenders before going under the tires. I would roar the whole time until my sides ached.
My dad said the state inspector warned that if we didn't spray the thistles, they would literally storm the entire farm. Of course, my dad was not about to buy into any such type of conspiracy theory. After all, he adamantly believed Lee Harvey Oswald really shot Kennedy and that Area 51 was actually just a military base. Plus, there was no way my dad was going to pay the state to fly a plane over and douse the thistles with weed killer.
So he informed me that once we were done mowing the alfalfa, we were going to cut down the thistles. This, of course, was only a temporary solution since the roots would still be intact and the thistles would simply grow back again later in the summer, germinate, and then lie dormant over the winter. But Dad didn't seem too concerned up about that.
After mowing the alfalfa, we made one good sweep through the thistles when something wonderful happened. The far end of the mower dug into a gopher's mound and snapped the drive shaft that ran the mower. Wonderful. It was around six in the evening and both of our stomachs were growling, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend the entire evening mowing thistles.
Unfortunately as we pulled into the yard, Dad said "I want you to come with me out to the quonset."
Uh-oh. The quonset was my dad's laboratory, so to speak. From there he hatched all of his crazy ideas to keep me busy while he was gone.
I trailed him to the quonset in the dark part of the evening when our yard light turned on and illuminated everything in fake yellow light. He entered the quonset, rummaged around, and emerged with what looked like a wooden stick with some blue, twisted and jagged metal on the bottom.
"What is that?" I asked.
"It's an old fashioned sickle.”
Oh no. I could tell right away what he had planned: Kurt vs. the thistles.
"Dad, I won't be able to get them all. Dad, they'll just regrow. Dad, why don't we wait until the mower is fixed. Dad, then I'll gladly mow them down next week. Dad . . ."
But Dad wasn't having any of it. And so began my battle with the thistles. I spent many scorching July and August afternoons with my walkman stuffed into the back pocket of my jeans teeing off, literally, with the weed whacker, for it was little more than a wooden shafted golf club. Instead of a club at the end, though, this thing had a flimsy row of metal teeth. Part golf club; part saw.
The thistles had no natural enemies in our pasture. Our herd of 500 sheep sure didn't eat them. If Rambo was a plant, he would be a thistle. They had organized themselves into great, dense battalions around the pasture. Sometimes they were so tightly clustered that it was hard for me to cut a path through them. Despite their best efforts to defend themselves, it became my personal mission to drive the invaders from our land.

Over 10 years later, the thistles did indeed take over much of our farm, despite my valiant efforts. My dad finally relented and paid a local crop duster to drop the herbicide bomb on them.
I failed miserably in my stand against the thistles. In fact, by chopping them down when they were ripe and blooming, I unwittingly helped spread them. Their spores would catch the rare breezes and float across our land. But I didn't know any better then. I was just doing my job.

Now, what does that experience have to do with teaching English, specifically teaching composition? Well, a lot actually.
In composition there is an entity much like the thistle. It can invade an area and populate and choke out all of the good land. Likewise, it will serve as a nuisance, both literally and figuratively, for both the landholder and any one unlucky enough to come across it without adequate protection.
This entity is the five-paragraph theme.
Okay, to stretch this metaphor to greater lengths, I stepped into my first Communications class with a curriculum that included writing a four-page research paper. "No big deal," I unwittingly thought. I'm sure that is exactly what my dad thought when he saw the first thistles sprouting up too.
Before I knew it, we were three weeks into the research paper. It was only later in my teaching career that I realized I was unwittingly spreading the spores across my classroom. I infested my students with such statements as, "your thesis must have three aspects and it must come at the end of your introduction" and "each of your corresponding supporting paragraphs must have a topic sentence that correlates to an individual aspect stated in your thesis" and "you must use at least one direct quote and one paraphrase in each of your supporting paragraphs too" and "your conclusion should restate your thesis" and "your final page will be your works cited," and "you must include an outline that corresponds to your research paper's form." I thought, egads, that I was teaching my poor students how to write, just as I thought I was doing some good hacking away at the thistles 10 years earlier.
It is only now that I can see what the thesis/support paper really is: a rampant, parasitic creature that, instead of choking off quality pasture land and invading crops, chokes off a writer's voice and invades genuine writing.

The final straw for my dad with the thistles occurred when he was going to break open an alfalfa bail and feed it to some sheep. The bail erupted and instead of sprinkling alfalfa leaves into the trough, it spewed thistles in Dad’s face. The bail, in the guise of alfalfa, secretly housed a thistle. Somehow the thistles had breached his beloved alfalfa fields.
The final straw for me with the thesis/support theme occurred when I sat down to grade my Communications class's final personal essays. We had gotten the research paper out of the way earlier in the year, so I was really looking forward to these personal essays. I expected to encounter some interesting perspectives and genuine experience and, maybe even some shocking incidents. Instead the essays blew up in my face, exposing the five paragraph themes that lurked at their core. Instead of feeling free to write in some of the other forms we covered, my students had become overrun by the thesis/support form. Imagine instead of reading a lively narrative essay on a student's first deer hunt as a rite of passage, one gets a bland introduction concluding with "I learned three important lessons from my first deer hunt: how to work with others, how to trust myself, and how to take pride in a job well done" as its thesis. There is nothing more distressing for a composition teacher (at least a good one) to expect some lively exploratory essays and only to find out that they are themes in disguise. Somehow the thesis had breached my beloved teaching of the exploratory and personal writing.
Now it has become my personal mission to, if not eradicate, at least return the balance to my classroom between the 'theme' papers and the familiar essays. The task is a daunting one. While thistles can creep up and infest acre upon acre if unchecked, so can thesis/support papers. In The Essay, Paul Heilker, notes a study done by Russel K. Durst in which Durst discovered that once students learned the thesis/support paper form "'they tended to rely on the thesis/support structure almost exclusively in their English critical writing'" and "Ninety percent of the student texts in his sample were organized this way, students using the thesis/support form to structure literary analysis, autobiographical, informative, and argumentative compositions, and even writing outside of the English class." Furthermore, "the students in this study 'were almost totally faithful to the thesis/support [form] in their high school English writing, using it in virtually all of their [papers] from ninth grade on'" (2-3). If that doesn't reveal the frightening reality of a full blown infestation problem, I don’t know what else can.
It is my responsibility to try to cure my students of this blight. I plan to douse them with the familiar/exploratory/personal essay. Willaim Zeiger notes in his report “The Exploratory Essay: Enfranchising the Spiri of Inquiry in College Composition” that composition teachers need to begin exposing their students to familiar essays that foster ruminitive thinking and writing. This introduces students to the inquiry process of writing, which is often neglected at the univerisyt and high school levels. Instead teachers tend to solely expose their students to the demonstrative or expository process of writing, which involves producing thesis/support papers.
I will hack away at the backward thesis inspired demonstrative form of the research paper and plant the open and exploratory form of the familiar essay in its place, or at least next to it.
Will I be able to totally expunge my classroom of the thesis/support form? No. Instead I will teach them to use the familiar essay to foster the process of inquiry first. Then I will teach them how to apply what they have discovered to the demonstrative or expository process that has come to choke out the exploratory process in English classrooms at both high schools and universities.
I will also keep the thesis/support paper around because it is a viable writing form, not the only writing form as most seem to think. Even if I had been able to destroy all of the thistles, I still would have kept a few around for variety. They are a viable life form after all.
And maybe, just maybe if we hit a lull in my classroom, I can rev up my three wheeler and take my students screaming on a ride through the thesis/support patch. Maybe that will teach them a lesson.