Week 6, Response to Classmate's Journal

You're totally right about the five paragraph essay not providing a worthwhile framework for our students' writing skills. However, I believe that evaluators for statewide writing tests are specifically trained to target these kinds of formulaic essays and fail them! There is a move to grade these essays on their ability to express sound ideas with good reasoning that are organized efficiently and are interesting due to word choice, sentence fluency, voice, and conventions. Transitions are also highly important so as to increase the flow of the work.

I always tell my students that four paragraphs are just as good as five, so long as they are well-developed, reasoned, and interesting. As teachers we need to continue creating better thinkers as we teach writing, and quality writing will inevitably follow. As you say, "the signs are what is important." 

I'm so glad that both of you brought this up because it is still a battle zone at my school regarding this idea. If you look over the past decade, the standardized tests almost required a formulaic, 5 paragraph essay that followed the "I'm going to tell you about..Now, I told you about" method. However, if you look at the new rubric for the GHSWT, students will fail if they write in the traditional, formulaic method. The rubric uses language like "repetitive". So, what do educators do?  We create a new formula for students to follow that we know will get them the passing grade. I know this seems terrible and restrictive, but so many students do not know how to write for purpose.
Our conversations about writing in our department always lead to the same issue, Purpose. If we could teach students that different writing calls for a different purpose, then they could create their own formula for the writing test. For example, I'll have my students create a brochure persuading fellow students of the best food in the cafeteria. Then, I'll say, now you are persuading a foreign exchange student, a nutritionist, etc. This shows them that depending on who you are writing to, you change everything. For me, teaching purpose of writing would clear up all of these arguments based on "formulaic writing".