Dennis Allen doesn’t think the five-paragraph essay is dead. In the years before his retirement in May from West Virginia University, the Professor Emeritus did not assign “strict” five-paragraph ...

The word essay derives from the title of a 1580 collection of writings by the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne. In his Essays, Montaigne set down his thoughts on whatever subject snared his ...

As a graduate student, I once drew a rather bad cartoon of an old schoolmarm (complete with Gary Larson-style beehive) standing in front of a class saying, “And when you finish your five-paragraph ...

Let’s just go ahead and kill the 5-paragraph essay at all levels, everywhere. Seriously. Let’s end it. We can have essays that happen to be 5-paragraphs long, but there shall be no more “5-paragraph ...