Proposal on 5PE (5PE: Expired) (?)

Purposes:

1. Help people understand why getting rid of old things or stuff that has been around for a while is hard but sometimes, often, necessary
2. Give them solid reasons for doing so
3. Give them a clear, concise, and simple vision of what should be done instead

---

In the spring of 2014, to satisfy a research assignment for Mike’s advanced composition course, Carissa decided to look into the five-paragraph essay (5PE). Her paper, which investigates whether the 5PE helps or hinders students’ processes of learning to write, begins

When an American high-school student thinks about writing, he or she thinks of a fundamental format he/she learned from grade school—the Five Paragraph Essay (5PE). This format is understood across the United States as the acceptable format for high school writing. It displays concise and organized thought in a format that is easy to follow and easy to grade.

In her essay, Carissa goes on to weigh arguments for and against the 5PE and concludes by taking the common-sense position that the 5PE should continue to be taught, but only during the early years and only as an introduction to how to organize your ideas. “The 5PE is only helpful,” Carissa concludes, if it “has an expiration date.”

In this article, we offer a reconsideration of this middle-of-the-road position that is held, we suspect, by many, if not most, American teachers, parents, and administrators. We begin by asking why abolishing the 5PE—the dream of many, if not most, writing educators (including Mike)—seems so untenable to those outside of the writing community. We suggest that, aside from the fact that the 5PE has achieved iconic (and therefore dislodgable) status in American culture (Janet Emig has called the form the Fifty Star Theme), Americans are unlikely to accept arguments for the abolition of the 5PE principally because they are unable to imagine or have not been presented with alternatives. What the 5PE does is offer a concise and easily understood formula for “how people learn to write.” Until Americans are provided with an alternative vision of “how people learn to write” that is as concise and as easy to understand, they will be unlikely to accept arguments for the abolition of the 5PE.

Two points:

1. Many of us take a conservative viewpoint towards childhood, believing that many of the things we experienced as children may have been unpleasant but that, now that we are adults, we can see that they were necessary and even "good for us."

2. When it comes to parenting, what we want for our children, there is an equally conservative impulse in the sense that we view how things were done for us as necessarily how they should be done for our children. Imagine a parent who believes that learning the 5PE was how she learned to write and she is told that they're going to teach her daughter something else. There is an element of "if it was good enough for me..." to parenting. We want our kids to get what we got because we (often mistakenly) believe that what we got was "right."

The 5PE is like all those things that people come to accept are good for them as they grow older

Having worked to establish common ground with our readers, we then move on to make our case for the abolition of the 5PE

---

Thomas Newkirk has nicely summarized the both/and argument as one in which

the defense that students need to learn the form first, and then it can be modified and made more complex later on.

It is, as Thomas Newkirk (2014) has pointed out, the one taken perhaps most frequently by average Americans who, themselves, were likely taught the 5PE during their school days.

 the most reasonable (and most frequent) position to take on the 5PE is that “students need to learn the form first, and then it can be modified and made more complex later on” (17).

and revisit the question of the 5PE’s usefulness, arguing that 2015 is the year in which the 5PE has reached its expiration date. To create common ground with our readers, we begin by taking up the question of why most Americans, like Carissa, find the argument for the abolition of the 5PE untenable. As