Where I grew up, they’d teach us the inner part of essays too… in the same way, every time, with similar length and structure.
So they would teach us to do it like so:
Introduction (do really good or something we won’t tell you how)
Claim (1 sentence, no more)
Evidence (2 sentences, more if I in particular allow it in my class)
Reasoning (3 sentences, must be at least 3 sentences regardless of the amount of reasoning required)
Repeat 3 times (never 2, never 4 or more, regardless of topic)
Always the same length, always the same structure, and doing to many or too little sentences even if it would make sense (which led to people stretching their word count) would get you a bad grade, and doing any kind of different structure would also get you a bad grade (think: making a claim at the beginning, but only answering it at the end with a callback) while discussing other points between that.
When told to then write more narrative driven things, we were given absolutely no guide on how to do it, and just told to “write a story”.
I remember in school they at some point decided that literally every class must require students write a 5 paragraph essay every quarter. And those 5 paragraphs must be:
Introduction
Argument 1
Argument 2
Argument 3
Conclusion
Absolutely no other line breaks were permitted regardless of existing grammatical/stylistic rules you may be breaking in the process and you must have exactly 5 paragraphs with exactly those contents, no more, no less.
Since literally every writing assignment was now a 5 paragraph essay, including both big English assignments where they wanted a couple thousand words, and the simple little one day assignments where they just wanted half a page, they all had to be exactly 5 paragraphs. I honestly entirely forgot how to properly paragraph my writing. It was fun, in the way that it was infinitely frustrating. Now whenever I see a 5 paragraph essay format I get emu war flashbacks to school and cringe so hard
Where I grew up, they’d teach us the inner part of essays too… in the same way, every time, with similar length and structure.
So they would teach us to do it like so:
Always the same length, always the same structure, and doing to many or too little sentences even if it would make sense (which led to people stretching their word count) would get you a bad grade, and doing any kind of different structure would also get you a bad grade (think: making a claim at the beginning, but only answering it at the end with a callback) while discussing other points between that.
When told to then write more narrative driven things, we were given absolutely no guide on how to do it, and just told to “write a story”.
I remember in school they at some point decided that literally every class must require students write a 5 paragraph essay every quarter. And those 5 paragraphs must be:
Absolutely no other line breaks were permitted regardless of existing grammatical/stylistic rules you may be breaking in the process and you must have exactly 5 paragraphs with exactly those contents, no more, no less.
Since literally every writing assignment was now a 5 paragraph essay, including both big English assignments where they wanted a couple thousand words, and the simple little one day assignments where they just wanted half a page, they all had to be exactly 5 paragraphs. I honestly entirely forgot how to properly paragraph my writing. It was fun, in the way that it was infinitely frustrating. Now whenever I see a 5 paragraph essay format I get emu war flashbacks to school and cringe so hard