Good Writer Bad Writer

Originally appearing on the blog “Good Writer, Bad Writer,” the post called “The Five-paragraph Fix” was written by Shaun Patrick Doyle, a Writing Consultant at Cornell University. It is a unique approach in presenting the argument of lengthy crtical thinking papers being easier than, what many claim to be more of a comfortable writing, a short 1-2 page paper. The author of this blog makes a personal realization of why he used to believe long essays are harder and how that belief has changed as he grew out of the five-paragraph structure of writing a paper. Writing long papers require hard work in coming up with the argument and brainstorming deeper questions that allow you to know the topic you are discussing in depth, but once you have developed strong research it is easy to meet the required word count for those lengthy critical papers.

Thinking critically to avoid relating your argument to only your belief is hard for writers to learn because we “rarely see good examples of it in our culture.” When you write as a critical thinker it allows writing longer in depth essays a lot easier because you have more information to present to your audience.
In order to begin to develop depth in your research, Shaun Patrick Doyle claims that you must “recognize what [you] don’t understand.” Once you develop more research through websites, news articles, textbooks etc. you are able to find facts that contradict the other side of the argument to make your statement more trustworthy to the reader. You then get to this point of contradiction where you begin to be able to understand things in a simplified way and as this article states, “if we go into depth to change our mind, we probably are going to have grounds to go into depth and change the mind of our