The Great War and Modern Memory: A Partial Defence of the 5-Paragraph Essay

The 5-paragraph essay has a terrible reputation. It is often seen by writing instructors as a simplistic formula that teaches students to prioritise form over content or, worse, simply to avoid ideas that are too complex to be squeezed into its structure. At its very worst this avoidance becomes for students a habit of mind; good ideas become those which can be explicated in a single-sentence thesis, framed as one side of a two-sided debate, and defended with three "points," each supported by one or two pieces of direct textual evidence. Any idea that does not fit this structure is discarded before it is even considered. This critical view of the 5-paragraph essay is correct. The 5-paragraph essay is, in its dominant usage, a terrible formula.

And yet, it seems to me, there is some scapegoating going on here. Not everything bad about sophomoric writing can be blamed on an essay structure. Conversely (and maybe this is the more debatable point), plenty of good writing is possible within that structure. The key is the scope of the argument.

Consider Paul Fussell's classic work of cultural history The Great War and Modern Memory, originally published in 1975. In many ways, Fussell's book follows the book-length version of the 5-paragraph essay: It has an introduction framing the argument, followed by a number of chapters (the professional academic's body paragraphs) supporting the argument with different sub-claims and evidence, and then a conclusion. Fussell has more chapters than does the 5-paragraph essay have paragraphs, so his is technically a kind of 9-paragraph essay. But the basic structure remains the same.

Fussell's book, though, is extraordinarily good, not only brilliant in its analysis but a page-turner in its content, at turns shocking, amusing, and fascinating. The book achieves this level of excellence, I am arguing, not despite its conservative structure, but because of it.

Fussell's thesis is that World War 1 was narrated by its participants and remembered by the wider culture through the lens of irony, in Northrop Frye's sense of that word. Each chapter takes a different broad topic and explores it, providing evidence and analysis of the ways irony shapes our understanding of the war.

The book should suffer from obvious methodological problems. It does not propose any specific method in its approach either to historical documents or to more literary texts. It is very vague in what it sees as the relationship between writers and the underlying historical facts that shape their narratives, let alone more thorny questions of the relationships between ideologies and individual consciousnesses. It does not define its scope by a particular archive; instead it ranges widely across poems, maps, military orders, soldiers' folklore, architecture, and diaries, amongst many other forms of texts. In short, it should be kind of a mess.

What holds the book together, then, is exactly its thesis-driven structure. With an argument in place for each chapter, Fussell is free to range widely, grabbing what evidence he needs from wherever he can find it, and bringing to bear whatever methods of analysis he needs to make his case. That is to say, what makes the book work is its traditional structure: Thesis, followed by evidence, followed by analysis. The rhythms of that structure allow the content to range widely, to remarkable effect.

But if the structure is so traditional, what saves the book from being the pedantic drivel opponents of the 5-paragraph essay detest? The saving grace is the nature of the theses that drive each chapter: they are invariably broad and loose, leaving space for exploration far beyond the simple proving of a legalistic case.

Take the opening paragraph of the chapter "The Troglodyte World": "The idea of 'The Trenches' has been assimilated so successfully by metaphor and myth...that it is not easy now to recover a feeling for the actualities. Entrenched, in an expression like entrenched power, has been a dead metaphor so long that we must bestir ourselves to recover its literal sense. It is time to take a tour" (39). The argument here is clear: Insufficient attention has been paid in the literature on the war to the origin of this metaphor, and this critic is going to right that wrong. The invitation, however, is not to hear the author prove the case but, rather, to take "a tour" of some of the implications of this observation.There is argument here, but also exploration and observation.

This, it seems to me, is a model of how the thesis-driven essay (if not just the 5-paragraph one) might be resuscitated in literature classes. It is not that the structure of the argumentative paper needs to be discarded, but rather that the arguments in such a paper need to be bigger, more expansive, and more generous. There needs to be room in the structure for more than just proving your own case and refuting your enemy's.

Elsewhere in the book, Fussell addresses directly this structural concern that runs throughout the text. In the chapter "Adversary Proceedings," he criticises the tendency to collapse ideas too quickly into a simplistic frame: "As it grows politically conscious, literary discourse naturally takes on the theoretical characteristics of postwar political adversary proceedings. And that is fatal for it" (118). That is to say, literary texts that simply pick a fight with an enemy are dull if not actively deadening of their readers.

One might say the same about literary criticism. The fear of the 5-paragraph essay is grounded in a fear of generally dull and often actively simplifying, stultifying argument. The structure, so the argument goes, requires students to be pedants and bores. But we might, I am suggesting, avoid this trap without discarding entirely the standard structure of argumentative academic writing. The key, at least in the context of writing about literary and cultural ideas, might be to make arguments that are not opening briefs in adversarial proceedings, but invitations to a tour.