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Breaking The Five-Paragraph-Theme Barrier By Thomas E. Nunnally

772 Words4 Pages

Breaking the Five-Paragraph-Theme Barrier
“The five-paragraph essay theme is a national phenomenon,” wrote Thomas E. Nunnally, “Students from all over are proficient in the form” (3). He is right that students are constantly being taught that the five-paragraph essay is the proper format when it comes to writing an essay. The five-paragraph essay does have some usefulness as a guide and an organizational technique when formatting essays. However due to its lack of creativity and restricting nature, it is sometimes not the ideal choice when it comes to writing articles such as research and journal articles. In this essay, I will summarize the reading “Breaking the Five-Paragraph-Theme Barrier” by Thomas E. Nunnally and I will also talk about …show more content…

It contains the introduction paragraph, that must include a hook that grabs the attention of the readers, a thesis statement and a preview of the three arguments that you will be discussing in the body paragraphs, the three body paragraphs, containing the topic sentence that states the argument for each paragraph, the supporting points or examples and an explanation as to how this example supports your thesis statement, and the concluding paragraph which includes a restatement of the thesis, a summary of the main topic and arguments (1). The five-paragraph essay was designed for an experiment at an open junior college in Georgia, for inexperienced writers. At first the students who used this format of essay writing excelled on their SATs. But as the years went on, other students and institutions caught on to this format and began to use this it as well. This caused the inexperienced writers who were excelling to drop back down to their original position (2). Soon enough, the five-paragraph essay became the universal essay writing format, influencing many colleges and even high

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