Russ' point about the
Russ Hunt wrote:
>Jamie raises an interesting point . . .
>
>
>
>>Though I, as noted, have never seen (as student, teacher or
>>citizen-reader) the famous 5-para essay,
>>
>>
>
>I have, but _only_ in the context of writing courses. I've
>never seen one in the wild (but on the other hand, I can't
>remember ever seeing any of the other academic essay formats we
>teach (or use for teaching) in the wild, either.
>
>
>
>>If I had to guess, I'd guess that the form was created out of
>>thin air (i.e., with few real-world antecedents) by teachers
>>for teaching purposes (for better or worse).
>>
>>
>
>Yep. But I think I'd argue that the 5pe is just a special case
>of a much larger problem with "academic" (= class-based) writing
>formats.
>
Reading your posts, it strikes me how that larger problem is so much
different than the examples you both used of rhetorical writing in
communicative practice. So many of the paper assignments that my
students get are exercises to allow professors and TA's to be able to
mark students' understanding of curriculum through their writing about
their reading. The essay form has been high jacked for the purpose of
marking a students' ability to use discourse appropriate to the course
curriculum and make an argument using concepts from the readings. It's
much more of a performance than a communicative exercise. And, the
five paragraph essay may have been developed to help students' do some
of the formulaic work of that performance. Didn't someone use the dance
metaphor of bar exercises earlier?
It takes an act of creativity, perhaps, to step outside the parameters
of some of these assignments and actually create your own "communicative
exigencies" to write well, and perhaps that's expecting too much,
considering much of the academy is unwilling to change how they create
assignments.
Writing teachers may be caught because we work, often, on the margins
helping students to create those "rhetorical exigencies" but not able to
influence the greater problem. And, the five paragraph essay may well
be one of those bad, even "Evil" or "Lucifer" like, compromises to a
writing teacher's dilemma of how to teach people how to write well given
that their assignments encourage curriculum performance and not good
writing.
Maybe though we are talking about shifting the focus of the discussion
both for our students and our colleagues.
Cheers,
Victoria Littman
Learning Strategist
University of Toronto
>
>-- Russ
>St. Thomas University
>http://www.StThomasU.ca/~hunt/
>
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