The word essay derives from the title of a 1580 collection of writings by the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne. In his Essays, Montaigne set down his thoughts on whatever subject snared his ...

Will AI kill the five-paragraph essay? To find out, I asked my ninth grade English teacher. The five-paragraph essay is a mainstay of high school writing instruction, designed to teach students how to ...

A common teaching tool among English teachers is the five-paragraph essay because it helps students write about any given topic. It’s been the building block of composition classes for decades, and ...

Dennis Allen doesn’t think the five-paragraph essay is dead. In the years before his retirement in May from West Virginia University, the Professor Emeritus did not assign “strict” five-paragraph ...

John Warner has read enough college student essays to diagnose what's wrong with the way Americans write. After 20 years teaching undergraduate writing courses, including a recent stint at the College ...

The five-paragraph essay is indigenous to high school students just like the cell phone is an appendage to a teenager’s hand. The cell phone connects students to the social world; the essay connects ...

Regular readers are well-familiar with my campaign to move beyond the teaching of the five-paragraph essay. For this reason, I was thrilled to be introduced to a new book, Changing Practices for the ...

The latter half of Rion Amilcar Scott's outstanding new collection, The World Doesn't Require You, is the brilliant novella "Special Topics in Loneliness Studies," about a college professor at the ...

The Writing Resource Center (WRC) will hold its first General Campus Workshop series event of the semester, “Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay,” Friday, Sept. 18, from 12:45 to 2 p.m. The workshop will ...

Undergraduate students are invited to the first workshop in the Writing Resource Center’s Academic Inquiry Seminars workshop series Friday, Sept. 20, from 1 to 2 p.m. in Bellflower Hall. This session ...

As a young student, the five-paragraph essay was the bane of my existence. I had been taught to write clearly and without flair — to state a thesis and to develop it concisely. The five-paragraph ...