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 ...

Has the five-paragraph essay, long a staple in school writing curricula, outlived its usefulness? The venerable writing tool has largely fallen out of favor among influential English/language arts ...

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 ...

Let’s just go ahead and kill the 5-paragraph essay at all levels, everywhere. Seriously. Let’s end it. We can have essays that happen to be 5-paragraphs long, but there shall be no more “5-paragraph ...

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 ...

Hi there! You do know that right now digital communication dominates and student writing increasingly reflects social media patterns, don’t you? This is a pertinent reason to pay attention to the ...

Paragraph Topic sentence Supporting sentences Concluding sentence Different ways of paragraph development. A topic sentence is the sentence that introduces the main idea in the paragraph. It is ...

Once the introductory paragraph has sufficiently engaged and set the scene for the reader, the real development happens. Teaching students to really develop their ideas meaningfully is essential to ...