REAL WRITERS DON'T COUNT THEIR PARAGRAPHS. Formulaic writing: good for assessment, bad for everything else.

Students throughout grade school, middle school, and high school are taught to write the "five-paragraph essay." It is the cornerstone of most developmental writing textbooks I have seen. This is the drill, the formula, the mind-numbing process: In your first paragraph, Tiffany, you must state a thesis, the main idea that you will develop throughout the rest of your essay, and this thesis should be the last sentence in the paragraph. In your second, third, and fourth paragraphs, you must support your thesis with three components of evidence, examples, or illustrations -- one component per paragraph. And in your final paragraph, the fifth, you must present your conclusion, which is a restatement of your thesis in different words along with a little extra tag to give your reader something to ponder further.

Can any bit of instruction be more stilted, unimaginative, and soul-crushing? Don't actually counsel Tiffany on how to think out and articulate a problem or a story; just give her a freakin' formula that can be chalked up on a blackboard in five minutes. When she copies it down in her little notebook, consider the job done. No. The "five-paragraph essay" is an abomination that should be eradicated from every curriculum in the country. Real writers don't count their paragraphs! The next question Tiffany asks is "How many sentences should I put in a paragraph?" As if there is a correct answer to that question as well. Hasn't she ever opened a book, any book? How do you get to be 20 years old and not know that there can be any number of sentences in a paragraph?

Assessment, however, is easier than working. If the common schools are going to persist in the five-paragraph essay could they at least amend the instructions so that the purpose sentence is also the topic sentence of the first paragraph. That was the hardest lesson I had to learn in writing research papers, was to put the topic sentence first in each paragraph, rather than lead readers to the conclusion (which, given how many papers there are competing for journal space, let alone readership, burdens the reader).