The Five-Paragraph Essay

Structure to help critical thinking

Much of the writing you did in high school was very informal and personal. There is nothing wrong with an informal, personal essay, but many of your college courses will require more. An informal, story-telling approach does not really stretch your critical thinking skills or help your readers work their way through complex topics, so you need a more complex, analytical model for essays.

One good beginning point is the five-paragraph essay. It's not the only way to write a college paper, and it certainly won't work for every topic, but it's a good basic structure. (By the way, it doesn't always have to be five paragraphs, either.)

Here's the basic idea:

1. An introduction that sets up the topic and contains the thesis
2. A body paragraph that deals with the first main subtopic of the thesis.
3. Another body paragraph that deals with the next main subtopic of the thesis.
4. Yet another body paragraph that deals with the final subtopic of the thesis.
5. A conclusion that brings closure to the whole essay and somehow points back to that thesis.

Each of those body paragraphs (numbers 2, 3, and 4 in this example) will hold together with a strong topic sentence.

Lengths

So how long should an introduction be? What about the conclusion? How long should each body paragraph be? The right answer should probably be "whatever the audience and topic require," but that's not helpful. Newspaper and magazine writing uses short paragraphs because of the narrow columns. One recent Newsweek article was around 97 words per paragraph. A Time article was around 93. An academic Internet article aimed at English teachers and researchers came out to 95.

I took a look at sample student essays from a couple of textbooks, and the simpler “here's how I feel” essays had paragraphs in the 100-word range, while the essays that were more researched and scholarly were in the range of 150 to 200 words per paragraph. Consider what this means:

• If half of your essay is introduction, you should rethink what you're trying to do.
• If your essay has paragraphs that are only two or three lines, you aren't giving yourself room to actually develop your thoughts.
• Those huge paragraphs that fill a whole page and cover three topics should probably be broken up.

Thinking through your strategy

You have three or four body paragraphs to work with (maybe five if you are writing paper over 1000 words). Ask yourself some questions:

• Must this be a chronological story? There might be a much better way to present the material.
• Do you want to deal with one side first, then the other? Cause, then effect?
  
• Do you want to open with your strongest material, or build to the big finish?

A couple of comments and warnings:

• Do not panic if you can't figure out three subtopics. If the essay is fairly short, two will do just fine. And don't panic if you have more than three. Just don't overdo it. In a short essay, five or six subtopics would be a lot—probably too many.
• The idea is to develop the essay with subordinate points, so if you have only a sentence or so to say about a subtopic, it's probably not that important. Don't give it a paragraph of its own.
  
• Don't think of this as a form to fill in (like Income Tax). It's a structure to help you with your thinking. You have to do the thinking first.
• Lots of fine academic writing doesn't fit the five-paragraph model, so don't panic if your essay works another way.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.

The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.

Revised 10/5/23 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.