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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

John Warner has read enough college student essays to diagnose what's wrong with the way Americans write. After 20 years teaching undergraduate writing courses, including a recent stint at the College ...

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 ...

Reading and writing were always my favorite subjects when I was in school, and I can still remember when I was taught that a proper paragraph had five sentences in it. It was probably around fourth ...