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

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Based on my high school experience, my view of writing has always been that the five-paragraph essay will be able to carry me through my life, and therefore, I would not have to learn another essay writing style but master this one. But in the essay “Breaking the Five-Paragraph-Theme Barrier” by Thomas Nunnally, we are told that “Students need to understand that they practice on the FPT to learn the principles of effective composition, principles that can be applied to any writing task, not to master a single format that will answer all their writing needs.” (70-71). In other words, Nunnally is saying that the five-paragraph theme (FPT) is supposed to be a guideline to determine ideas and a general concept of an essay but not be the only way of writing. I agree that the FPT is a good starting point in essay writing, a point that needs emphasizing since so many people believe that they cannot stray from this template, as I once did. In this essay, I will summarize the main ideas of Nunnally’s essay, and my response …show more content…

The five-paragraph essay is introduced to us in grade 9 where we would continue to look at this format for the next four years, or what was told for the rest of our secondary education. In grade 11, the education system slightly increases the difficulty as they decided that you have to write compare/contrast essays but, the way I was taught to do these essays were the same as the five-paragraph essay. These essays were written using the “splicing” method as we would put one idea from one book then compare it with the same idea of the other book. I found this method difficult to write because you had to make each book fit perfectly together but not a lot of books could be compared with the same ideas. With being informed about the five-paragraph essay throughout my high school career I learn to memorize this format and its difficult to get out of this idea of essay

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