Category: Structure

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Academic writing Editing Structure Writing

Writing is Thinking: There Are no Shortcuts, Including the 5-Paragraph Essay

Click on this image to go to Jonathan Lang’s excellent post on “Unlearning the Five Paragraph Essay.”

There are misconceptions out there about writing, and one of them is that writers have talent and the rest of us don’t. Schools try to “teach” writing and just leave most people with a distaste for trying to express themselves with the written word.

Many of us had our writing styles ruined by education. I’m one of them. After eight years of full-time grad school trying to turn out PhD-prose, I became a horrible writer. Constipated and verbose at the same time. It wasn’t until I discovered new ways of writing qualitative research that things started to get better. People who tried to help me, editors at journals, colleagues, were at a loss.

I had to struggle through it. Writing poetry actually helped. Reading the new ethnography helped. A mentor would have also helped. But I was too embarrassed to ask, or even think of asking, or pay for a coach. After all, I was supposed to know how to write.

If you’re having trouble, it’s probably at least partly the fault of mass education. In particular, the five-paragraph essay formula is devastating to good writing. And that’s what schools teach, because busy high school English teachers with 200 students a day don’t have time to mentor beginning writers.

I’m going to say that having ideas is the most important part of writing. Writing is a process of thinking them through to find meaning. I often say, “I don’t know what I think until I write.” You may want to start with an outline, which can help organize your thoughts, but be prepared to let the writing go where it wants to. You can fix it in the next draft.

I generally disregard the conventions of mapping out an entire article or essay beforehand, because the process of writing unearths ideas and connections I didn’t know were there, what we call, “writing straight ahead.” (An outline can come after, when I’m struggling to figure out what the hell I just wrote. As I said, there are no shortcuts.)

I urge the struggling writer, at any level, to find someone who has time and patience to point out where you are successfully communicating, and who is able to help you identify and bring your ideas into the sunlight of the printed page.

Yes, to some degree this is a plug for our services. But even if you don’t want to pay for our help, or you don’t think we are the right people for you, it’s worth finding an editor you can trust.

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Structure

Back to Writing Basics

Christine de Pisan - Portrait of a Woman
Christine de Pisan. Portrait of a Woman

I recently edited a piece for Martha, a friend of mine. It was good and I hope she publishes it. It was a bit of an unusual story, since it was entirely monologue, talking to herself as if in real time about an abusive work situation and her unfolding understanding and the strength to walk away from it. The actual workplace events occurred over an extended time, but really everything took place in the narrator’s mind, and her voice was powerful and unique, raw and direct.

When she asked me for feedback, I was a little perplexed at first. It is stream of consciousness, and appears to be a spontaneous outpouring of thoughts. She asked me if I just thought it was a mess, since there was no timeline for what was described. How can I make comments about someone else’s lived experience? And what could I tell her that would preserve the immediacy and power of her prose?

In trying to formulate some sort of possibly meaningful feedback, I realized that the internal dialogue did, in fact, follow the familiar narrative structure. The writer started with her hurt and despair (beginning), relived some of the abuse (middle), and came to the awareness that she did not have to be manipulated into doubting herself—and could move on from the job (end). It then became very clear to me what would make the already strong work stronger: paying attention to the narrative structure while preserving its immediacy.

Rather a “Doh!” moment for me, I have to confess. The tried and true “rules” of writing are tempting to dismiss, but they always provide a touchstone. Once I realized there was indeed a narrative structure, I was able to plug into another one of my go-to’s for my own writing: using all the senses, and being specific, so that the reader can place themselves into the scene we have created. Even though Martha’s piece was all in the mind, she was still thinking about events in the physical world of space and time. It makes me think about the nature of memory and the relationship to the present moment.

Whether I’m struggling with my own writing or scratching my head trying to figure out what to say to an author, there are a few basic principles that are good places to start:

  • What’s the point? Is everything in the piece relevant to the point?
  • What is the structure? Even the most deconstructed postmodern writing has some sort of narrative. Deviations from the structure are best when carefully and intentionally done.
  • If there are descriptions, do they bring in as many of the five senses as possible? Are they detailed and specific?
  • Trust yourself, trust your voice.
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Academic writing Fiction and nonfiction writing Opening statements Structure Term papers

Structure: Once upon a time….

The end of Jean Cocteau's introduction to his film version of Beauty and the Beast.
The end of Jean Cocteau’s introduction to his film version of Beauty and the Beast.

Writers of nonfiction, including the academic variety, can often learn useful lessons from the more “artful” storytelling world of novelists, playwrights and filmmakers. The phrase “Once upon a time…,” despite or perhaps because of age (it’s apparently been in use since 1380), still evokes a sense of wonder. It’s a sense that has been exploited in numerous ways over the years, including George Lucas’ “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” in Star Wars to the title of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

The introduction to the first Star Wars movie.
The introduction to the first Star Wars movie.

Sometimes opening words can take on a life all their own. Think of the first paragraph of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” or “Rosebud,” the first word spoken in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. While Tolstoy’s sentence sets the tone for his novel, the dying word of Charles Foster Kane sets up a mystery (a question if you will) which the film’s story attempts to unravel.

Students are taught to write introductory paragraphs that clearly state what you are going to write about and how you are going to go about it. Unless you have been assigned to do one of those five-paragraph essays, your opening statement does not have to be your opening paragraph—it might even be several paragraphs long.

For instance, you could start off by telling an anecdote whose relevance to your topic is not initially evident. It could set up a mystery or question much like Welles did with “Rosebud.” One might also begin with an evocative quotation, such as “Once upon a time….” to start a book review of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, or Tolstoy’s “Happy families” to introduce your essay on the dynamics of families coping with schizophrenia.

While the use of anecdotes and/or quotations to start off your book or essay might seem a bit of a cliché, they can be useful literary devices to get you going. After all, it’s much more interesting than starting a term paper for your American Literature class with something as cut and dry as, “John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California.”