John had an interesting post about the five-paragraph theme several nights ago that jogged my memory. (I note also that his post yesterday concerned the passing of Clark Kerr, whose ideas have recently informed my thinking.) In reading yesterday’s New York Times, I was startled to see the following passage:
“As a student at Jefferson Davis High here, Rosa Arevelo seemed the ‘Texas miracle’ in motion. After years of classroom drills, she passed the high school exam required for graduation on her first try. . . At the University of Houston, though, Ms. Arevelo discovered the distance between what Texas public schools called success and what she needed to know. Trained to write five-paragraph ‘persuasive essays’ for the state exam, she was stumped by her first writing assignment. She failed the college entrance exam in math twice, even with a year of remedial algebra. At 19, she gave up and went to trade school.”
Such synchronicity begs investigation.
According to John’s post, the authors of the Research in the Teaching of English essay he mentions attribute the five-paragraph theme to Pierre de la Ram
Really good stuff, Mike. Daniel Keller at College of San Mateo just put me on to a discussion of this same NYT article at calpundit.com He has some fun attempting a 5 paragraph essay, but the discussion thread is quite good, virtually none of it informed by either the concept of rhetoric or the history of rhetoric. I made a post there with some of my notions, but I hadn’t read your much more substantial historicizing of the issue. I’ve always seen the 5P thing as a simplification, but I like Ong’s use of “shortcut” better.
There’s another long discussion at Jeanne D’Arc’s site. You can link from calpundit.
One reason I started blogging was to see if this format would be a vehicle for professional expertise to inform general discussions of writing and the teaching of writing. I think this may be a good moment for the informed to engage the concerned.
Of course, there’s the damn papers to think about, too.
Thanks for the links, John — with what you offered, and with the additional discussion at Household Opera, it seems to be one of those neat moments when everybody’s talking about the same thing.
Looking back now, I’m not so certain about the direct lineage from the forensic oration — but it seems to me there’s gotta be some influence, just as there’s gotta be some influence from Ramus’s denying of invention as a category of rhetoric, and from his dialectical outlines. And Calpundit makes the important point about the five-section essay or theme, which is quite a different beast from the five-paragraph theme. Cicero certainly couldn’t have done any of the Verrine orations in a scant five paragraphs, which points to the rather obvious difficulty that the model isn’t much use once you start getting over 1000 words or so.
Which leads me to some interesting thoughts: I wonder if one could write a fugue-like extended essay composed of a series of nested five-paragraph themes, so that the exordium consists of five paragraphs, and then five paragraphs for the narratio, and so on; something like a more explicitly systematized version of Susan Griffin’s wonderful, mysterious extended essay “Our Secret”, or like the beautiful recursive structure of the Goldberg Variations.
Hmm… which five-paragraph essay are we talking about? I am not a classicist, but Cicero’s dispositio doesn’t seem to have much in common with the creature I work with in freshman comp. That form — introduction, three parallel points, and conclusion — is a different, rhetorically weaker beast. I confess that I espouse disdain for the robotic 5-paragraph essay, yet in feshman comp class I reward students who can do it well — that is, not robotically.
Well, I think the links from John’s post give a good idea of what’s at issue. But yeah, Dennis, that’s precisely my point: at some point (and I think it may have started with Ramus, and I also agree with John that it probably became codified and heavily institutionalized sometime during the postwar college boom), sections became paragraphs and the powerful tool for thinking became an intellectually limiting straitjacket.
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