There's been a small flurry of interesting posts about the infamous five-paragraph essay recently. Body and Soul links to a New York Times article about the low standards in Texas high schools, which begins with an anecdote about a Texas high-schooler who was "trained to write five-paragraph 'persuasive essays' for the state exam" and was "stumped by her first writing assignment" in college. Calpundit replies with a parody of the five-paragraph form ("In conclusion, Texas schools are bad. They have lots of dropouts, low test scores, and five paragraph essays. Texas schools are bad."). Pennywit makes a case for why it's not such a bad way to write an essay, if the student learns to use it flexibly, to which Calpundit replies. If you're interested in writing pedagogy, go read them all — and don't miss the comment threads.
If I had to state, five-paragraph-essay-style, my three "supporting reasons" for why I hate the five-paragraph form with a passion — even though I do think students need some kind of structure when they're just learning to put together an essay — I would say this:
1. It's supposed to be a tool for beginning writers to master and then move on. But it's often very difficult for my college composition students to break out of the five-paragraph mode. They listen to my impassioned defense of less rigid formats and try to write essays that break the mold, but it's as if it's imprinted on their brains and they write in that format even when they're trying not to. Some of them do manage to move on, but others get stuck.
2. It discourages students from making strong connections between the ideas presented in the body of the paper. In theory, you could use the five-paragraph template to come up with an essay whose body paragraphs go like this: "Let's take Point A as a premise (and here's why A is a reasonable starting point). Now, if we examine the assumptions behind A, we can see that B follows from it. However, we may not realize that we should also consider C (but here's why we should)." But almost invariably, what students learn to write is some version of "We can see [thesis] through Example A, Example B, Example C," with the paragraphs about A, B, and C connected to each other with a string of "Also"s or "Moreover"s. What it generates is more a list than an essay.
3. It encourages students to write the dullest, most formulaic introductions and conclusions ever. Lots of them recognize how dreary it is to write a conclusion that restates everything that's been said in the introduction, and lots of them worry about it, but since they've been taught over and over again to begin their last paragraphs with "In conclusion, this essay has shown that [insert slightly reshuffled sentences from introduction]," they're not sure what else to do.
My officemate recently received a new composition reader that included a completely hilarious poem about the five-paragraph essay. I'll post it if I can find the book.