Good Riddance to the Five Paragraph Essay?

Here’s a short piece directed at K-12 teachers arguing against teaching the five paragraph essay.  That formula too constricting and artificial. I would say the same about the five sentence paragraph.

After high school, I doubt that many students follow these formulas, because they are too limiting. Do Legal Writing professors teach formulas for writing that virtually no students follow in real life? I submit that IRAC and its variants fall in this category. Maybe formulas like IRAC and how-to-write-a-case-brief have value in the very early days of law school. However, we should encourage students to move on fairly quickly.

(ljs)