Against Five-Paragraphing

My plea for ideas in my last blog post brought in, not exactly an idea, but an argument:  from a friend who thinks the five-paragraph essay (which I gave a back-handed slap to in passing) is a fine tool for teaching students to write.

Our discussion over this led me to think, Okay, I’ll write a five paragraph essay myself.  Of course, then there’s still the problem of topics and ideas, but it instantly came to me, à la Kramer in Seinfeld: I will write a Five Paragraph Essay about Five Paragraph Essays.

So here goes.

The Five Paragraph Essay

Amidst the wide variety of writing forms, from sonnets to haiku to novels and non-fiction books to newspaper articles and journal writing, one form stands out as a monster of iniquity, as the most artificial of creations, and that is the five paragraph essay, invented by a textbook writer in a moment of Satanic delight, no doubt (just joking, please don’t sue me).  There are three problems with the five paragraph essay: first, it demands that the writer divide his topic into three parts regardless of whether that makes sense; second, it forces the writer to focus on form instead of content; and third it actually infects the content.

Some topics do not lend themselves to tripartite division.  I know there are those who think that three is a magical number and the key to everything, perhaps even to all mythologies, and there is after all the Trinity for Christians to believe in, but not everyone is a Christian, and not all subjects have three parts.  If asked to explain my solution to a textual problem in Thackeray, I may not have three reasons for recommending a particular word; there may only be one reason, but a very good one.  Or there may be two reasons, or four or five.  The same even with boring topics, like how I spent my summer vacation: maybe I did only one interesting thing or six or seven.  Why is three so special?  If you asked a polygamist to write about his wives, he might be forced to leave one out.

Which should bring me to my third point about this structure infecting the content, but first I will discuss point two: that the structure distracts the writer from the content, from the ideas.  As Orwell suggested, good writing comes from good thinking.  The way to write a good article is to focus on the ideas in that article.  If your concern is about structure and putting a thesis sentence at the end of your first paragraph and making sure you have three sub-topics, you are diverting yourself from the natural development of your essay.

And worse that that, and this is point three, you may even be infecting the content of the essay, as in the case of the polygamist with four wives who will have to leave one out to comply with the form.  My friend said, What about sonnet-writing or rhyme?  Those are artificial forms; are you against them?  And no, of course not, though I think only skilled writers (not the beginners who are typically forced to write five paragraph essays) should essay them.  They do, though, create an interesting tension between the ideas and the structure, whereas the five paragraph essay lets the structure conquer the ideas.  A bad poet, I suppose, might let the need for a rhyme dictate the idea he creates, but with the five paragraph essay not only bad writers but good find the structure intruding into the content: Oh, I have to find a third sub-topic.  Why?  Because the structure requires it.  What if that distorts the point of your essay?  So be it.

And thus we see the evils of the five paragraph essay.  It forces writers to come up with three sub-topics when there may only naturally be two in their subject (or four or five, or only one).  It distracts the writer from developing their ideas by forcing them to concentrate on the surface form.  And it can even infect the ideas by forcibly preventing the writer from saying what they want to say.  I see that in some ways this third reason is much like the second, and if I hadn’t had to write a five paragraph essay I might have combined them, but that’s the problem with writing to a structure.

…

Phew, that was hard, maybe the hardest thing I ever wrote, and I’ve written novels and a PhD dissertation and dozens and dozens of articles, not to mention these blog posts.  And this is what we force our poor children to do, and then we wonder why they are turned off writing.  What criminals we are.

P.S. Something I left out because the form didn’t really let me go down this path was that writing to a strict formula like this means leaving the conscious mind in control and not allowing the creative sub-conscious, the source of delight in writing, to get much of a look-in.  But next time.

Ideas and Writing

So I’m reading the London Review of Books, and an ad leaps out of me.  This is unusual.  Ads don’t usually leap out at me.  I don’t notice them.  For that matter I don’t notice much in the visual landscape around me.  One time, visiting my mother, who wanted to buy me a bathmat to take home to Vancouver, and who asked me what colour my bathroom was, I was reduced to saying, “Well, I’m pretty sure it has a colour.”

A former hockey buddy once told me that of course I noticed ads, because everyone notices ads.  I was quite bemused by the notion that he could know me as well as he professed to and also that he could pronounce on what everyone does.  He should read Montaigne, but he won’t because he also announced that it’s pointless to read old books: Didn’t I believe in progress?  Every age was an advance on its predecessor, so we know so much more now than people of earlier ages that it’s utterly pointless to read them.

But in this case I really did notice the ad.  It said, “Ideas are easy; writing isn’t,” and was an ad for a writing academy that promised Structure, Feedback, and Support.

Well, I’m all for support and even for feedback, as long as it consists of, “Sheldon, that was great.”  People ask for criticism, as Somerset Maugham says, but all they want is praise.

He also said, “There are three rules for writing the novel …”  I quoted that line to an English 100 class I was teaching years ago, and they all picked up their pens in anticipation.  However, they were most disappointed when I finished the quote by saying, “… but nobody knows what they are.”

Students like rules.  Well, I shouldn’t generalize.  Students who have been trained to write five-paragraph essays like rules.  I made the mistake of trying to unteach that formula and had anguished students approach me to say, “But the five-paragraph essay is the only way I know how to write.”  Or, “I understand that that’s a bad formula, so can you give us a good formula?”

Sigh.  Good writing is not done by formulas or rules, unless you think paint-by-number is a good way to go, and maybe it is.  Who knows?  But I tried to teach my students to think for themselves, to follow their ideas, and forget about structure.  “Grasp the subject, the words will follow,” as Cato said.

(But I did relent in later years and tell them that if they really had to they could stick to the five-paragraph structure they’d been brought up on.  I only cared about results, I said; if they could write a good essay following the formula, what did I care?)

Structure is not what writers need (or students).  Ideas are what’s hard to come by.  The ad has it exactly wrong.  Writing is dead easy (well, for writers); it’s finding something to say that’s the problem.  Thackeray used to envy Dumas for being able to produce so many new plots (though maybe he had his factory doing that for him).  I like stories that are “hot with,” he said, lamenting the fact that he himself could not invent like that.

Jonathan Swift once told a friend that he could write an essay on any subject.  On a broomstick then, said the friend, and so we have an essay by Swift On a Broomstick.  I used to think of that as a piece of bravado, and maybe it was, but maybe it was also a plea of desperation: Give me an idea, a subject, something to write about; anything, it could be anything.  Please.

Andrew Coyne in a recent column talked about improv comedians needing to start off with a suggestion from the audience in order to narrow their options.  It’s impossible to write about anything; you need something to write on (or do improv about).

Some people have chided me for not writing a blog post for a while, but now I’ve decided it’s their fault; they should be giving me something to write about.  Send me some ideas, anything, please.

People used to do that when I was writing my novel.  That’s the other sort of feedback I liked.  I didn’t like people criticizing.  Praising was great.  And even better was people saying things like, “Why don’t you put something about quilting in the novel?” (a suggestion from a co-worker).  Or “Why don’t you write more about tigers and elephants?” (a suggestion from my mother).

So there you go, people, send me your ideas.

The New Totalitarians

I was at one of Vancouver’s Canada Line train stations today, and the loudspeakers were blaring:  “TransLink [that’s our beloved transit company] reminds you that only one bicycle is allowed on trains during peak hours.”

Now, the odd thing about this announcement is that it was made on a Sunday.  There are no peak hours on Sunday.  Just some transit company foolishness, I thought at first, but now I’m thinking TransLink is playing a deeper game.  Announcements are rife on the Canada Line, telling passengers not to intrude on the tracks, not to let their backpacks impede other passengers, and so on.

It occurs to me that the point of these announcements is less their subject matter than their existence.  Marshall McLuhan would be impressed.  It’s the medium that matters much more than the message.  There is never really an intrusion onto the tracks, it doesn’t matter about bicycles on Sunday, and so on.  What matters is that TransLink is conditioning, or trying to condition, its passengers to listen and obey these faceless pronouncements from the transit deity.

Winston Smith would also be impressed.  It’s like the orders for a Three Minute Hate.  Or like the announcements I read about at the Beijing Olympics, where spectators were reproached for I forget what.  Big Brother is watching, or at least exhorting.

This is coupled with TransLink’s latest campaign, which targets noisy passengers, sloppy passengers (eating and leaving debris on buses and trains), selfish passengers (hogging seats), and so on.  This was a quite clever campaign from TransLink, diverting attention from its own failings and getting passengers to say what bothered them about OTHER PASSENGERS.  Not what bothered them about the transit company, of course.

I at first thought of this simply as a clever example of divide and conquer.  It is that, but it is also more of this TransLink paternalism, treating the passengers like children who have to be told to clean up after themselves, play nice, and so on.

Now, there are some passengers who hog seats and block aisles with backpacks, or play noisy music.  It can be annoying.  But to have the authorities broadcast exhortations about behaviour is, frankly, a little disconcerting.

And woe betide anyone seeking to object to the announcements.  The buses now blare out each and every stop they’re making.  On non-express buses you can be bombarded with street names every few seconds.  I wrote in to complain, and was put in my place: TransLink wants to serve all its users, I was told.

(By this they mean they want their service accessible to the visually impaired.  I get that.  But the effect is that those of us with sensitive hearing and those of us who would like a quiet bus ride during which they can read or think, well, we’re out of luck.  I wrote back to say if you’re serving all your users, how about users like me?  This time they wrote a pseudo-apology, but were quite clear that their wonderful new system was here to stay.)

I realized that I was in the presence of True Believers.  TransLink most likely thinks it is Doing Good and that those who object are benighted dinosaurs.  It’s a dangerous combination: True Belief and Power.  There are other True Believers at the Canada Line stations: Mormons, for instance, standing there forlornly, hoping someone will stop to talk or pick up their literature.  But they have no power; they’re no danger.

But TransLink has the power to enforce its will on us, the public, with the aim, it would seem, of making us feel like erring children.  It is a dangerous path to go down.

On Grammar and Causes

They published a letter of mine today.  In the paper it looked almost like this:

Robert Fulford's reference to the Apostrophe Protection Society reminds me of the group founded by me some years ago: the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Passive Voice (PFLPV).

It never had many active members (naturally), but it seems to have done its job.

Now I am thinking of founding a new society to protect the word "less." Not sure whether to call it the Anti-Fewer League or the More or Less Collective.

Hopefully, it will succeed too.

I say “almost,” because the editors couldn’t resist removing my final “Hopefully,” missing my joke about the campaign against that word, which I think was at its height in the 80’s.

Strange thing about grammar campaigns; they come and go like moral panics or other fashions.  Now we’re in the midst of a campaign in which people who care about grammar say you should always (well, almost always) use the word “fewer” where a few years ago the standard word was “less.”  So we get such monstrosities as “75 words or fewer” (on the letters page of a newspaper no less) or “one fewer province” (ugh).

Oh, well.  In between, or even before and after, there has been the attack on the passive voice.  And this at a time when people find it fine to say “Her and I met yesterday” (shudder).  Perhaps it’s precisely because people have given up on what used to be standard grammar for such things as “her and I” that they have latched onto foolish “rules” to make them feel they are still upholding something.

Who knows?  And who knows why fashions win adherents in other fields?  Where are the Jonas Brothers of yesterday?

The language does seem to be in flux, though.  On Twitter anything goes, and the language I was raised on (by reading the literature of the past century or two) seems to be fading.  But languages are always changing.  I do object to causes, though, especially when they make things worse.

On Voting

Election Day in Beautiful British Columbia, and I feel exhausted.  Is it the prospect of casting a ballot and anxiety over the results, or just a lack of sleep?

I tried to count how many times I’ve voted over my increasingly long life, but lost track after about a dozen (including federal, provincial, municipal).  Strangely, though I work for a student society, I’ve hardly ever voted in a student society election.

A co-worker complained that just once she’d like to vote for someone who was better than the lesser of two evils, and I can understand the sentiment, but I rather like voting.  I would do it more often, but they only let you vote once in each election.  Think how  much more voting you could do if you could cast multiple votes.  In fact, I remember a student politician who did just that, but it had unpleasant repercussions.

So I walked to the Voting Place, as they call it – there must be a more technical term, but that’s what it said.  Had to dodge numerous cars: motorized voters.  Perhaps they should have drive-through voting places for them; in fact, didn’t I read about that somewhere?

Anyway, I managed not to get killed on the way to doing my civic duty, arriving at a Seniors Centre (usually I vote in a church, but perhaps my age is catching up with me: my voting number was 90, which is not quite my age yet …)

When I opened my ballot, my eye was caught by the Platinum Party.  Wonder who they are, I thought; I really should have done my homework.  But really there were only two choices in the election, and I let my intuition tell me who to vote for.

I try to follow my intuition or my gut instinct in voting.  I’ve gone against it only once that I can recall, and that’s the one vote I most regret and would call back if I could.  Not that it matters collectively.  One vote never decides an election (or almost never), but I like to be true to myself and vote for who I really want to vote for, and that time I didn’t.  I was too much in the grip of my upbringing that time, yet my inner voice told me it was time to break from that and do something radically different.  I didn’t, though, not that time: in later elections, yes, by which time it didn’t seem that radical anymore, but not that once, and I am sorry for it.

Then there’s the horse race aspect.  The results which will come in hours from now, and which it may be interesting to watch, though I have a house guest from afar and she may not be interested in what we British Columbians do.  I was interested in her province’s election when I was there last September, but then Quebec is always interesting.  And they even had shooting.

When I left the polling station, an elderly woman came at me with determination.  Uh oh, I thought, am I going to be attacked inside the Voting Place?  But she only wanted to give me a sticker saying I’d voted.  Interesting, I thought.  That might help advertise the election and increase turnout, so I took the sticker.  Didn’t put in on, though.  Voting is a private thing.

Formative memories

Memory is a strange thing.  Sometimes when I talk to my sisters, they remember things from our childhood that I have no recollection of.  Sometimes it’s the other way around.  Did we live such different lives growing up in the same household?  Or do we just tell different stories?

Some stories seem odder than others.   I think of one, for instance, which is simply the memory of a television show I caught a glimpse of once in Manchester, when I was a student there.  It was some semi-animated (clay-mation?) show with puppet-like characters in a spaceship.  The scene I remember is the ship plummeting to Earth (or perhaps some other planet).

“Oh, they’re going to crash,” some fellow student said as we watched in the common room.

And the puppets were running around frantically, shouting to reverse thrusters or whatever the technical term was.  And suddenly they seemed able to get the engines going to start reversing their descent.

“Oh, they’re going to make it after all,” said my fellow student.

But they didn’t.  It was too late.  The ship began to reverse course, or its descent slowed, but gravity was too strong for it; the inevitable fall had the ship in its grip, and after a brief moment of hope, there was a crash, explosion, death.

This scene stays in my mind, not constantly of course, but whenever I think something is off course in my life and needs to be corrected.  Quick, quick, I tell myself, like the puppets in that show; reverse course; fire the thrusters.  Why I should remember this scene of destruction at such a point is beyond me.  Perhaps it’s a negative example, a cautionary tale, warning me to do something before it’s too late.  But there it is.

-----

Or you can run into your Ex and be reminded of unpleasant things.  One could call those deformative memories, I suppose, but I won’t go there.

Instead what suddenly comes to mind is a memorable quote – not memorable enough for me to remember it accurately, but it’s something along the lines of, “To live is to battle with demons.  To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.”  From Jung or Ibsen or maybe Robertson Davies (I think Davies maybe quoted them).  Do writers sit in judgment of themselves or of others?  Or both?  It’s the first part of the quotation that strikes home, though.  Sometimes life seems like a struggle with demons.

But that’s not a very positive place to end, so I’ll conjure up another quotation, from Raymond Chandler of all people, or really his hero Philip Marlowe, saying,

“The only salvation for the writer is to write.”

Which may be why I write this blog, from time to time.

On Meeting Roger Ebert

Well, perhaps meeting is a slight exaggeration.  But I did sit down with a group including Roger Ebert one day back in the 90’s.  It was back when I taught English at the University, and used to drop in at the Faculty Club on Friday afternoons with a group of fellow English instructors.  On this day when I dropped in, I saw at one end of the group gathered in chairs around a coffee table the unmistakable form of the man who had helped to make “Two thumbs up” such a well-known catch phrase.

“That’s a famous person,” I said to a colleague, who nodded in agreement.  We were sitting at the other end of the group, and I never got introduced to the famous person, and didn’t say anything to the famous person, which is why I wouldn’t exactly call it “meeting.”  Still.

For however long we sat there the famous person regaled us with stories of Hollywood, film-making, and the like.  I don’t remember any of them, but what I do remember is the reverential air that descended on us.  Now, this was not a generally reverential group.  It was composed of smart-alecky, bright young PhD-types whose most common mode was satire or sarcasm.

Sarcasm, by the way, as I notice by perusing dating sites, has become a positive quality somehow.  Women promote themselves by saying things like, “I have a sarcastic sense of humour,” though they sometimes qualify this by adding that they are not mean-spirited or harsh.  I don’t know; it seems to me that the essence of sarcasm is mean-spiritedness or harshness.  When a woman announces that she’s sarcastic, it’s a red flag for me; I back away, slowly, keeping my back away from her.

Anyway, our group back then, twenty years ago or so, tended to sarcasm.  Perhaps it should have made me back away, but then what would I have done on Friday afternoons after a week of teaching or working on my PhD?  Perhaps I was even guilty of sarcasm myself; I tend to take on the coloration of the group I’m in … Or can that be true?  I often fancy myself as the outsider in any group I’m in.  Does everybody feel that?  Perhaps I became a sarcastic outsider.

Anyway, on this day with Roger Ebert, no one was sarcastic, certainly not towards Roger Ebert.  “Oh, Mr. Ebert,” someone would say, “tell us about so-and-so.”  Or, “How was it to work with so-and-so?”  Or “Is Hollywood really as nasty as people say?”

I was astonished.  What had happened to the sharp, cutting intellectuals who used to dominate the group?  Had they been replaced by a bunch of adoring fans?  Does fame have such power?  In the absence of other things to worship, do we turn to celebrities?  (Well, the answer to that last seems obvious now that I write it.)

But there must be some other path besides sarcasm and adoration, it seems to me.  Maybe treating people as equals, though I hasten to say I don’t mean to put myself on the same level as Roger Ebert.  Or is that just adoration sneaking in?  I did register that he was a famous person, and I was rather mute that afternoon, perhaps as a result.  Was that just silent adoration? 

And I wonder what the famous person felt about the adoration.  I’ve occasionally been on the receiving end of that sort of thing: when introduced to the friend of my girl-friend at the time, who was totally tongue-tied around me, in an admiring way, because I had just published a novel.  I remember thinking, Well, this is nice in a way, but I’d rather just be able to talk normally with someone rather than bask in this admiration.  But maybe that’s just me.