LONG LIVE THE FIVEPARAGRAPH ESSAY?
Reason magazine|June 2024
AI WRITES A PRETTY GOOD ANALYSIS OF 1984.
EMMA CAMP
LONG LIVE THE FIVEPARAGRAPH ESSAY?

WILL AI KILL the five-paragraph essay? To find out, I asked my ninth grade English teacher.

The five-paragraph essay is a mainstay of high school writing instruction, designed to teach students how to compose a simple thesis and defend it in a methodical, easily graded package. It’s literature analysis at its most basic, and most rigid, level.

A typical five-paragraph essay asks students to pick a simple thesis, usually from a list of prompts, and compose a short introductory paragraph, followed by three paragraphs each laying out a different piece of supporting evidence, followed by a final paragraph—usually beginning, “In conclusion….”

Critics argue this assignment kills student creativity and turns writing into an exercise in pure drudgery. I tend to agree, remembering my time spent composing five-paragraph essays as soul-rending—forcing me to focus on sticking to a formula and a restrictive prompt rather than actually analyzing the books I was reading.

But the sudden ubiquity of large language models such as ChatGPT threatens to upend this status quo.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة June 2024 من Reason magazine.

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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة June 2024 من Reason magazine.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

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Reason magazine

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Reason magazine

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Reason magazine

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Reason magazine

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