Ode on a Grecian URL
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Death to the Five Paragraphs!
The third hebdomadal topic is below, but I'm sure you know that.
A number of you have asked about how to structure an essay if the AP English five paragraph format isn't what I'm looking for. This is a very good question, and here is the answer: an essay should be structured so that every paragraph after the introduction builds closely off of the paragraph that preceded it - in toto, these paragraphs should address a single important question and should suggest something about the consequence of the answer. (Often, the answer is just a better question. That's good.)
Another way of putting this is that your essay should follow a question, evidence, analysis, question structure. (It's too bad that QEAQ doesn't make a good acronym.) Let me spell this out:
The goal here is to think of an essay as progressive, each idea building off of all the ideas that precede it. Your essay, like Middlemarch, is a kind of experiment: determine the question you want to ask and the parameters by which you wish to constrain it. After that, it's just scientific method: formulate a hypothesis, challenge it with experimentation (evidence and analysis), and formulate a new hypothesis to replace the old one.
A number of you have asked about how to structure an essay if the AP English five paragraph format isn't what I'm looking for. This is a very good question, and here is the answer: an essay should be structured so that every paragraph after the introduction builds closely off of the paragraph that preceded it - in toto, these paragraphs should address a single important question and should suggest something about the consequence of the answer. (Often, the answer is just a better question. That's good.)
Another way of putting this is that your essay should follow a question, evidence, analysis, question structure. (It's too bad that QEAQ doesn't make a good acronym.) Let me spell this out:
- Your first paragraph should introduce, immediately and in detail, the question you want your essay to answer.
- Your second paragraph should offer some evidence - usually a close reading of a passage or stanza - that begins to answer this question. Furthermore, it should begin to analyze that evidence: what does it mean? What is its importance?
- Your third paragraph should further that analysis and return it to the original question: how does your analysis begin to answer the question? How does it complicate the question? Within this paragraph you should begin to ask how this evidence and analysis suggests a new, broader question. You can ask this new, broader question in this paragraph, or maybe you'll want to take the whole fourth paragraph to describe the new question.
The goal here is to think of an essay as progressive, each idea building off of all the ideas that precede it. Your essay, like Middlemarch, is a kind of experiment: determine the question you want to ask and the parameters by which you wish to constrain it. After that, it's just scientific method: formulate a hypothesis, challenge it with experimentation (evidence and analysis), and formulate a new hypothesis to replace the old one.
:: posted by Mike, 5:34 PM