Slay the monster! Replacing form-first pedagogy with effective writing instruction

Rowlands, K.D. (2016). Slay the monster! Replacing form-first pedagogy with effective writing instruction. English Journal, 105(6), 52-58.


Dare I hope that the five-paragraph essay will finally become extinct? Rowlands makes a case for ending our focus on “form-first” writing instruction as well as any other form of writing where the components and sequence of components becomes more important than whether what we write achieves our desired purposes, and whether our writing reaches our intended audience. Rowlands then immediately addresses the next question most teachers will ask: “Then what should I do instead?” For some, the five-paragraph essay is all they know, both as teachers and as students. You can’t take away time-honored practices without offering a better way.

Rowlands offers practical advice on how the dinosaur that is the five-paragraph essay might evolve into something that would reflect better what “real writers” do when they write for authentic purposes. She begins with the prewriting phase, which she calls “invention strategies” (p. 55) and points to some ways that writers might think about what they know and want to say about a topic. We are referred to three resources and told to make a Google search. I plan to make that search, but a little more on the three resources mentioned would have been nice (small quibble, but it would have helped).

On page 55, there is a helpful table on various text structures which lists the purposes of four major text structures as well as organizing principles that suggested teaching strategies to me. I’ve taught about text structure, and tried to help teachers plan to teach about it, and this table made more sense than some of the discussions of text structure I’ve seen in methods textbooks.

There is a brief discussion about teaching genres (again I wished for a little more on that) and then a concise but useful discussion of revising and its importance to the writing process. Revision may be the most important, and the most misunderstood, part of the writing process. It may also be one of the most difficult parts, and the most difficult to teach. It’s easier to just think about five-paragraph essay form and writing mechanics, but revising really is at the heart of good writing. I wonder if there is ever very much true revision going on with five-paragraph school essays?

My favorite part was the discussion of teaching writer’s craft (with an information-packed sidebar, Figure 2, on p. 57, which provides specific lesson suggestions). As a big fan of the work of Katie Wood Ray and Donald Graves, I love the emphasis on looking at mentor texts, noticing what authors intend and how they achieve those intentions (good writing is not magic—it’s a craft!), and then trying to emulate what “real” writers whose work we admire actually do. Anyone who teaches writing (should that be all teachers?) will find useful information here.

This article was a breath of fresh air for me. Why do we teachers cling so tightly to forms? Is it just easier? How we love our forms, frameworks, templates, and other structures! We say they are a scaffold for students, but could it be they really more of a scaffold for teachers? When you are straining your mind to come up with what in the world to do with that class full of students (maybe even waking up in the night), these forms provide a welcome structure. They give us something to go on, and alleviate at least a little of that pervasive terror that we may not really know what we’re doing when we try to teach writing.

Trouble is, focusing on form never really worked. Forms don’t engage kids with writing. They don’t reflect what real-world writers do. Nowadays, as Rowlands points out, the forms don’t even help kids pass standardized tests any more. As she writes, it’s time to “slay the monster”, scary as it may be, and try a better way.