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The subject, on the other hand, is not as unpromising as the format makes it appear. It could easily be redirected along a more productive pathway. (If the food is bad, what are the underlying causes of the problem? Are students getting what they ask for? Is the problem one of cost? Is the faculty cafeteria better? Why or why not?)

Now let’s look briefly at the introductory paragraph from a student’s essay on a more academic subject. Here we can see a remarkable feature of 5-paragraph form— its capacity to produce the same kind of say-nothing prose on almost any subject.

Throughout the film The Tempest, a version of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, there were a total of nine characters. These characters were Calibano, Alonso, Antonio, Aretha, Freddy, the doctor, and Dolores. Each character in the film represented a person in Shakespeare’s play, but there were four people who were greatly similar to those in Shakespeare, and who played a role in symbolizing aspects of forgiveness, love, and power.

The final sentence of the paragraph reveals the writer’s addiction to 5-paragraph form. It signals that the writer will proceed in a purely mechanical and superficial way, producing a paragraph on forgiveness, a paragraph on love, a paragraph on power, and a conclusion stating again that the film’s characters resemble Shakespeare’s in these three aspects. The writer is so busy demonstrating that the characters are concerned with forgiveness, love, and power that she misses the opportunity to analyze the significance of her own observations. Instead, readers are drawn wearily to a conclusion; they get no place except back where they began. Further, the demonstration mode prevents her from analyzing connections among the categories. The writer might consider, for example, how the play and the film differ in resolving the conflict between power and forgiveness (focusing on difference within similarity) and to what extent the film and the play agree about which is the most important of the three aspects (focusing on similarity despite difference).

These more analytical approaches lie concealed in the writer’s introduction, but they never get discovered because the 5-paragraph form militates against sustained analytical thinking. Its division of the subject into parts, which is only one part of analysis, has become an end unto itself. The procrustean formula insists on a tripartite list in which each of the three parts is separate, equal, and above all, inert.

Here are two quick checks for whether a paper of yours has closed down your thinking through a scheme such as 5-paragraph form:

Look at the paragraph openings. If these read like a list, each beginning with an additive transition like “another” followed by a more or less exact repetition of your central point (“another example is …,” “yet another example is …”), you should suspect that you are not adequately developing your ideas.

Compare the wording in the last statement of the paper’s thesis (in the conclusion) with the first statement of it in the introduction. If the wording at these two locations is virtually the same, you will know that your thesis has not responded adequately to your evidence.

ANALYZING EVIDENCE IN DEPTH: “10 ON 1”

The practice called 10 on 1 focuses analysis on a representative example. In doing 10 on 1, you are taking one part of the whole, putting it under a microscope, and then generalizing about the whole on the basis of analyzing a single part.

The phrase 10 on 1 means 10 observations and implications about one representative piece of evidence (where 10 is an arbitrary number meaning “many”).

The phrase 1 on 10 means one general point attached to 10 pieces of evidence.

As a guideline, 10 on 1 will lead you to draw out as much meaning as possible from your best example—a case of narrowing the focus and then analyzing in depth (see Figure 10.2). Eventually, you will move from this key example to others that usefully extend and