Use the “full circle” approach for an essay conclusion

Posted on August 3, 2014 | Leave a comment

The introduction and the conclusion are usually the two most difficult parts of the essay for a student to write.  When it is time to write the conclusion, I always suggest rereading the introduction because the introduction and conclusion should support one another.  “Going full circle” is a common idea in writing—starting with one main idea, developing many subtopics, and returning to the main ideas to end.

Here are some ways to do that, using the “when I lost a tooth” topic from a previous blog.  If you can include humor in your conclusion, and leave your reader with a smile, that is the best ending possible.

Anecdote introduction:

My Grandpa says he doesn’t remember when his first teeth fell out but he remembers when his last one did.  It was after he cracked a walnut with his teeth, and a back tooth broke apart.  He had to go to Dr. Taylor’s office to have the rest of the tooth pulled out.

Anecdote conclusion:

Grandpa says I should bite into a walnut with my wiggly tooth.  And I’m tempted after seeing Grandpa’s teeth in a glass on his nightstand.  What if I lost all my teeth and not just the wiggly one? Imagine all the money the tooth fairy would bring me!

Dialog introduction:

“Hey, Mom, how much did the tooth fairy bring when your teeth fell out?”
“A nickel a tooth.”
“A nickel a tooth!  That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Didn’t they invent quarters back then?”

Dialog conclusion:

My mother got a nickel, my older cousin got a dime, and my big sister got a quarter.
“Mom, what’s the chance of me getting a half dollar for my loose tooth?”
“Pretty good, honey.”
Sometimes it’s great to be the youngest.

Statistics introduction:

When I was in first grade, every single kid lost a tooth, and most of us lost more than one.  Billy Emsing was the champion though.  He lost seven teeth that year.  I remember because we kept track with a bar graph on the bulletin board.

Statistics conclusion:

Now that I’m starting fifth grade, no one is losing their teeth any more.  But some kids, like me, are starting to sprout up.  Maybe I could get my teacher to post a bar graph of the number of inches we grow this year.  With my dad being six feet two inches, I have a chance of winning that contest!

Startling claim introduction:

Suppose you brush your teeth for a minute in the morning and a minute in the evening every day this year.  That’s 730 minutes, or more than 12 hours standing in front of a sink brushing your teeth.

Startling claim conclusion:

Twelve hours brushing teeth in one year times 80 years is about 960 hours in a lifetime.  That’s 40 days of our lives spent brushing our teeth.  Yikes!  I better buy a strong toothbrush.

In the next blog we’ll look at some other kinds of conclusions.

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Use a prewriting organizer to write the first draft

Posted on July 23, 2014 | Leave a comment

After helping students create a good prewriting organizer, I sometimes see students begin their first drafts with no prewriting organizer in sight.  “Where is it?” I ask.  They dig through their writing binder and find it, hidden somewhere.

This is a graphic representation of a third grade student's handwritten mind web.

The best prewriting organizers for expository and persuasive essays are mind webs (click the graphic for more information).

This tells me that those students are not used to writing an essay with a prewriting organizer.  They don’t know how to use it.  I can’t assume that “If they write it, they will use it.”  They need to be taught how to use it.

I insist that the prewriting organizer be situated to the side of the notebook paper on which the student is writing his first draft.  To show me that he is using the prewriting organizer, I ask him to cross out lightly the ideas as he includes them in his essay.  By the time the essay is done, all the ideas on the prewriting organizer should be crossed out.

An example of a modified timeline organizer on Babe Ruth's life--childhood, school years, and baseball career.

Use a modified time line as a prewriting organizer for narratives (click the graphic for more information).

If a student is coming in cold after creating a prewriting organizer the day or the week before, I ask her to read the prewriting organizer to herself in the order in which she has numbered the subtopics.  This warms up her brain and reminds her of the details and the scope of her essay.

While she is writing the first draft, I usually allow the student space, looking over her shoulder occasionally.  If she is making progress, I leave her alone, but if she seems stuck, I intervene.  The most common problem is how to start body paragraphs.

Use a chart for comparison and contrast essays.

For comparison and contrast essays, use a chart or a Venn diagram as a prewriting organizer (Click on the graphic for more information).

We reread the information planned for the paragraph and see how it relates to the essay topic, and from this we write a topic sentence.  If a student has not written an essay before, I offer more help than I do for experienced writers.

Sometimes students recognize that they should change the order of their subtopics.  Before beginning the rough draft is a good time to do that.  Just cross out the numbers on the organizer and write new ones.  Sometimes students recognize that they have little to say about one subtopic, but they can think of another one with greater detail.  This is a good time to make that change.

Sometimes the student has lost interest in the topic of the essay completely and wants to change topics before he begins the first draft.  Usually I let him discard the completed organizer and start over.  You might think that creating that organizer was a waste of time, but no.  The student has practiced organizing an essay, an essential skill of a good writer.  Not every planned essay needs to be written.

In our next blog, we will talk about the conclusion, another difficult part of the essay for many students to write.

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Does every sentence need a transition? No!

Posted on July 16, 2014 | Leave a comment

Is anything wrong with this paragraph?

Paragraph using obvious transition words.

Every sentence in the above paragraph begins with a transition word.  This is how many students are being taught to write, as if the reader cannot follow the sequence without reminder words at the beginning of each sentence.  In the above case, the words are obtrusive, calling attention to themselves, but they could be more glaring if the student had used “Secondly,” “Moreover,” “Furthermore,” “Additionally,” and “In conclusion.”

In student text books, transition words are listed by type:  chronological (first, next, then, later, finally), comparison (and, also, similarly, like, additionally), contrasting (however, but, rather, in contrast, although), and showing cause and effect (as a result, therefore, consequently).  Students are taught to use one of these transition words at the beginning of almost every sentence.  They are led to think they must use a single word or phrase that is not organic to the writing or they don’t have transitions.  Their writing becomes bloated with these needless, distracting words.

Is there a better way?  Yes!

Look back at my last paragraph which begins with “In student text books.”  Can you find a transition?  In the second sentence there is one transition word, the word “transitions” itself.  The first sentence mentions transition words, so when the second sentence repeats the word “transition,” that is a subtle yet useful connection to the information in the previous sentence.  The third sentence uses the word “transitions” again, as well as the word “they” to refer back to students in the previous sentence.  In the final sentence, “distracting words” refers back to “transitions.”  So as you can see, there are several transitions, but none calls attention to itself.  Rather, each does what transitions are supposed to do: subtly organize ideas to keep the reader following clearly.

How can students improve their use of transitions?

  • Teach the student not to start every sentence with an obvious transition word.  If the student must use transition words that are not organic to the writing, tell her to tuck them into sentences rather than highlighting them at the beginning of sentences.
  • If students frequently use beginning sentence transitions, ask the students to cut out half of them; then ask them to cut out half of the rest.
  • Ask students to eliminate most multisyllabic transitions.  “And,” “but,” “so,” and “since” do the job just as well as “additionally,” “however,” “therefore,” and “because” without drawing attention to themselves.  In general, the more syllables a transition has, the more obtrusive it is.
  • Most of the time, the student should repeat words, or use pronouns to refer back to words or ideas already mentioned.  Those repeated words or pronouns become organic transitions.

Compare the paragraph about rocks at the beginning of this blog with the same paragraph using more subtle transitions:

Repeating words and using pronouns as transitions.

Click on the graphic to see a comparison of the two paragraphs.

In our next blog, we will talk about using the prewriting organizer to write the first draft.

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The five sentence paragraph

Posted on July 6, 2014 | Leave a comment

Why the five sentence paragraph?  One reason is that teachers seem to think five sentences are long enough to explain a subtopic, but not too long.  One or two sentences seem skimpy, while seven or eight sentences might seem unduly long.  Five is just right.

Limiting students to five sentences straitjackets their writing.
Teachers also think 25 sentences give them sufficient material to judge the student’s writing skills.  In other words, twenty-five sentences meet the teachers’ need for evaluating student writing.

But I think limiting students to five sentences straitjackets their writing.  For example, I encourage students to use dialog to enliven their essay writing.  But when they find out that each time the dialog shifts from one person to another a new paragraph is needed, they freak out.  “But then I will have too many sentences.  And too many paragraphs!”

Sometimes students think up an excellent example that cannot be neatly stated in four sentences to follow the topic sentence of a body paragraph.  They tend to skip that example and settle on something less detailed and less good in order to limit their paragraph to five sentences.

When as a writing tutor I am working with students who know that their teacher demands five sentences per paragraph, I back off.  But when I am working with students who are writing to improve their skills, I encourage breaking this lockstep format.

Next we will discuss transitions.

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The five paragraph essay

Posted on June 25, 2014 | Leave a comment

I bet 99 out of 100 of my students have been told that every paragraph must contain five sentences, and that every essay must have five paragraphs.  This idea is so indoctrinated by teachers that students fear veering from it.  One of my best writing students composed an essay for which we thought up a single line zinger after the conclusion.  It was perfect—irreverent and definitely humorous.  She wouldn’t use it.  “I wouldn’t have five paragraphs anymore,” she told me.

Five paragraph essay structure.

Click on the graphic to enlarge it.

Why the five paragraph essay, anyway?

    • Formal logic is the tradition upon which essay writing is based, and that tradition goes back to ancient Greece.  In formal logic, premises lead to conclusions.  In five paragraph essays, the topic sentences of the three body paragraphs lead to believing the truth of the thesis, stated in the introduction and repeated in the conclusion.
    • Essay writing began in France in the 1500’s, not as a structure for writing as much as a structure for logical thinking and arguing.  Essays then were not confined to five paragraphs, and their purpose was to persuade with clear thinking.
    • In the 1800’s in the US, essays—then called themes—became increasingly standardized so that they could be reliably assessed.  An introductory paragraph introduces the general idea and ends with a thesis statement which includes the three main points supporting the thesis.   Three body paragraphs each begin with an idea supporting the thesis and then go on to bolster that support.   The last of those three body paragraphs sometimes defeats a counterargument.  The conclusion cements the argument and repeats the main points.
    • Standardized testing took hold in the US in the mid to late 1900’s, and with it came formulas for writing essays that could be easily graded.
    • Today the five paragraph essay dominates in schools, starting in elementary grades and continuing into high school.

But why five paragraphs?  Why not four or six or seven?  I think it is the Western World’s preference for the number three.  Take away the introduction and conclusion and that leaves three body paragraphs for the essay.  Three has long served as an important number in western thinking, starting in the Catholic religion with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  The number three is important in many fairy tales such as “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “The Three Little Pigs,” and “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.”  Even Abraham Lincoln enshrined the number three with the phrase “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

This approach to essay writing requires that the writers know their thesis (that is, the conclusion of the logical argument) before they begin writing.  As a result, students are taught to brainstorm and to write outlines of their thinking before writing their first drafts.  These prewriting strategies help students to see the scope of the issue (brainstorming) and to narrow it down to its most important arguments (outlining).

Is this five paragraph structure good? 

On the one hand, students have a pattern to follow which limits the number of paragraphs within which to explain their arguments.  It requires conciseness and clarity, two qualities of good writing.

On the other hand, students are forced to conform their thoughts to a somewhat arbitrary pattern.  What if students have three excellent points to make, not two?  What if there are two excellent counterarguments that need to be defeated?  Oh well.

Next we will look at transitions.

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