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Byung-In Seo explains why she teaches the rigid five-paragraph essay to her remedial students. She argues that doing so gives the students a formula to follow. This is important because the majority of her have trouble organizing their thoughts when they try to speak with her, let alone trying to write in an organized manner. She states that once the students grasp the basic five-sentence, five-paragraph essay, she allows them to extend beyond that as they become more fluent in essay writing. I found this article interesting because after tutoring in a high school where the five-sentence, five-paragraph essay was the ONLY format allowed, I began to have a negative opinion of such rigidity. However, Seo's philosophy is one I can agree with and one in which I can see working to bring the remedial students to a higher level of writing. I also think that following Seo's lead will also help those students develop critical thinking skills that will benefit them in their everyday lives.

This article showed how a five-paragraph essay can actually be USEFUL in getting students to narrow down their topics. Ed White shows how this format keeps students limited to having three sub-points on one overall theme.Even if students in English 130 classes are writing a "more-than-five-paragraph-essay," I think the useful thing to take away from this essay is helping students to narrow down their focus. Even having students constructing an outline that has them narrow their topic and the sub-points of the topic would be really helpful for creating narrower papers that aren't all over the place.

I have bad news! He was being satirical. ;-) He wrote it in the dullest, most unimaginable way ever--which was part of his point.