When I was first trained in writing pedagogy, vilifying the 5¶ model was par for the course. It seemed fairly normal at some of my early institutions to announce, “How many of you wrote essays using the 5¶ model in high school? Well, throw all that out the window. College writing is nothing like that. We’ll have to learn about writing from scratch, starting now.”
I bought into this, at first, and sometimes the old habit creeps back in, but by and large I think it does more harm to dismiss the 5¶ model as useless, or juvenile, or simplistic, which I think, to students, translates as “stupid” or “a waste of time.” Positive learning should mean building on what we already know. So I tend to begin all my first-year writing courses with a version of the basic module below, which aims to show students:
- How to do a “says/does” deconstruction of a text, an exercise I learned while at Columbia University; and
- That skills learned from the 5¶ model (like organization, paragraphing, transition sentences) still apply, and the 6 (or 7, 8, 9, 10)
¶ model is about continual self-interrogation, which itself aims to promote intellectual curiosity.
Materials include: a video clip of the Ezekiel 25:17 monologue at the end of Pulp Fiction; and a two-column handout with the transcript broken up into 6 “paragraphs” in the left column (labeled “says”) and blank space in the right (labeled “does”).
First, without any context, I screen the clip:
Then I pass out hard copies of the handout, and play it again while students follow along with the transcript, which is broken into 6 “paragraphs” in the “says” column of the handout. This should take approximately 5 minutes. Afterwards, I suggest to the class that Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules is talking us through a kind of essay model, one in which thinking, rethinking, or other kinds of complication mark new paragraphs. I explain that we can think about what essays “say” (their meaning) and what they “do” (their function) at the holistic, paragraph, and sentence-levels. I then ask students to complete the says/does on the handout for the Pulp Fiction scene, with a partner or in small groups, depending on the size of the class.
After we reconvene, I find that initial answers usually consist of “introduction,” “example” or “anecdote,” “quote,” “counterargument,” “conclusion,” and other descriptors that apply to the parts of the 5¶ essay. I ask them what in the language tipped them off: e.g., what screamed “introduction” besides it being at the beginning, or what tells them a new idea is a new idea? They focus on transition words, conjunctions. They focus on how many times Jules says the word think. We discuss how the conclusion is a conclusion only because it ends the speech, not because it provides a tidy ending. It’s too much to resolve in such a short space. Resolution, here, isn’t cure but care: for the problem posed at the outset, for all the permutations of the puzzle that need to be explained to an outsider.
Sometimes abbreviated in my classes as “What Would Jules Do?” or “Pulp Fiction Does the Essay,” the Jules model doesn’t initially over-complicate the 5¶ model, easing students into the idea that more complex forms of argumentation aren’t always so neatly packaged, that it can take “paragraphs” of thinking, rethinking, and re-re-thinking to work through an argument, with each new idea potentially requiring at least 2 paragraphs of examination and explanation, and that they shouldn’t expect to establish world peace in 4 pages. The Jules model suggests that conclusions can be somewhat open-ended, leaving room for and acknowledging other avenues of inquiry.
In another sense, if as writers we’re always trying to shepherd the reader, the “says/does” exercise shows us how to determine how other writers are trying to shepherd us.
After this module, which usually takes a maximum of 20 minutes including the video screening, I have students practice what we discussed by conducting a “says/does” deconstruction of pre-assigned passages of the text that we read for the day. After that, we reconvene and compile all the says/does exercises to grasp the collaboratively (de)constructed progression of meaning through the text. This becomes a staple exercise for close-reading and for peer review.
If practice is needed, Anna Gibbs’ “Bodies of Words” might be a good in-class example, as paragraph-to-paragraph meaning (“says”) is sometimes coy, and the piece merges different genres, and therefore different “does” functions. While I usually run these lessons loosely to see what patterns and associations emerge across different students and classes, this sample says/does markup might be a helpful guide.
