In his blog The White Rhino: A Chicago Latino English Teacher, Ray Salazar argues that the five-paragraph essay should be tossed out the window. The Chicago public school teacher writes that the ...

But hopefully not in five-paragraph essay form. ... Aristotle turn green with envy; in fact, the only mitigating factor is deciding whether to use 1st person or 3rd person expository voice.

Bottom line: the five-paragraph essay’s inherent prioritization of structure over style can have long-term damaging effects on students who never learn to move beyond it, but teaching the form ...