This is the VOA Special English Education Report. Millions of students have been taught a formula that has nothing to do with chemistry. The formula is for writing a five-paragraph essay. First, write ...

Many students say there is no easy way to write college papers. This may be especially true if English is not your first language. Most teachers agree that there is no single correct way to create a ...

Will AI kill the five-paragraph essay? To find out, I asked my ninth grade English teacher. The five-paragraph essay is a mainstay of high school writing instruction, designed to teach students how to ...

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 ...

As a young student, the five-paragraph essay was the bane of my existence. I had been taught to write clearly and without flair — to state a thesis and to develop it concisely. The five-paragraph ...

A common teaching tool among English teachers is the five-paragraph essay because it helps students write about any given topic. It’s been the building block of composition classes for decades, and ...

These days a certain literary formula is straitjacketing our children’s writing: the five-paragraph essay. Most English teachers require that students use this dull, rigid model in compositions about ...

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 ...

The latter half of Rion Amilcar Scott's outstanding new collection, The World Doesn't Require You, is the brilliant novella "Special Topics in Loneliness Studies," about a college professor at the ...