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 ...

Let’s just go ahead and kill the 5-paragraph essay at all levels, everywhere. Seriously. Let’s end it. We can have essays that happen to be 5-paragraphs long, but there shall be no more “5-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 ...

The five-paragraph essay makes you a more competent human, able to digest, analyze and articulate information with concision and clarity. But fundamentally, I struggled with this. I was a disorganized ...

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 ...

Regular readers are well-familiar with my campaign to move beyond the teaching of the five-paragraph essay. For this reason, I was thrilled to be introduced to a new book, Changing Practices for the ...

Headline: As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity. Biggest decline? Creative elaboration--expanding on ideas in novel and creative ways. Have we done this to children, with ...