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 ...

Once the introductory paragraph has sufficiently engaged and set the scene for the reader, the real development happens. Teaching students to really develop their ideas meaningfully is essential to ...

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 ...

“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This is a great opening if you’re writing a biography of the Messiah. Not so great for a college admissions essay, or ...

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 ...

An essay is a piece of non-fiction writing with a clear structure: an introduction, paragraphs with evidence and a conclusion. Writing an essay is an important skill in English and allows you to show ...

Extended "discourse," such as class presentations or essays written as school assignments, has a particular structure arising from particular expectations and standards. Such structure, expectations, ...

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 ...

In the most abstract sense, the function of an introductory paragraph is to move the reader from the world of daily life into the textual and analytical space of an essay. In a more concrete sense, an ...