Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The five paragraph thing

The other day I was vaguely thinking about a writing assignment for first-year composition (or beyond) that would explode the five-paragraph essay in some way. I think my idea was to ask students to write the essay as a web-based document that could then be linked from, and to use the links as opportunities to explore what couldn't be said in the five paragraphs, what they perhaps censored themselved from saying because they felt the need to follow the rules they had internalized about the form.

But now I see that Spencer already has a cool assignment that gets students to "explode" the five-paragraph essay, but through a kind of meta-exploration of the genre. So I'm linking to it in order to remember it the next time I teach writing.

1 comment:

metaspencer said...

Hey, I'm glad you spotted this post. It's a groovy assignment that has produced a LOT of original stuff.

:)