Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

After many years, I finally learn what a five-paragraph essay is.

Every now and then I learn something that embarrasses me. It is something that I feel like I should have learned a long time ago. Such is the case with the title of this post. I was stumbling around the Internet and bumped into a post about the good old, standard, five-paragraph essay. I didn’t know what that was.

I did some looking and found examples and tutorials here, here, and here. Wow, this is pretty good stuff. How is it that I never heard of this?

Well, I stopped taking English in High School in 10th grade. At the time, you needed three years of English to graduate. I had English in 9th and 10th grades and in 9th grade I took Journalism, which counted as a year of English. So, no English in 11th and 12th grade. Maybe they covered the 5-paragraph essay in those years. College? I scored high on the ACT test, so I passed over the first semester English class and only took the second semester. That was a writing class, but we never did the 5-paragraph essay.

I’ve written four or five books – back in the day when publishers printed paper books and tried to sell them in the book stores. I’ve written a hundred or so articles for magazines and journals (see the long list here). I’ve even written a few dozen short stories (see and buy them on Smashwords).

And now I have learned how to write a 5-paragraph essay. In retrospect, I could have used those techniques to write this blog post. Let’s see, if you don’t count the summary, this post has five paragraphs. Maybe next time I’ll use those techniques.