kill the 5 paragraph essay john warner

Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

There seems to be widespread agreement that?when it comes to the writing skills of college students?we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can’t Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn’t caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we’re teaching writing wrong. Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn’t prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules?such as the five-paragraph essay?designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments. In Why They Can’t Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.

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Why They Can`t Write – Killing the Five–Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities Paperback – 12 May 2020

An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing.

There seems to be widespread agreement that―when it comes to the writing skills of college students―we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write , John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules―such as the five-paragraph essay―designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.

In Why They Can't Write , Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.

• ISBN-10 1421437988
• ISBN-13 978-1421437989
• Edition Reprint
• Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date 12 May 2020
• Language English
• Dimensions 12.7 x 1.73 x 20.32 cm
• Print length 288 pages
• See all details

Product description

Why They Can't Write dissects the underlying causes of why so much writing instruction fails in the American system and it provides tested, practical solutions for doing better. The book is more than a how-to-teach guide, however. It diagnoses several important structural problems in American education, including standardized testing, the allure of educational fads, the abuses of technology-driven solutions, and cruel working conditions for teachers.

Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve . . . I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for.

I wanted direction on how to better teach writing, and I got it--sample assignments that I can tweak to fit my classroom and discipline in marvelous ways. But I got so much more. I closed the book feeling energized and motivated to go back to the classroom and make changes. In fact my first reaction, as I finished, was 'I have to go write about this!' Which so perfectly encapsulates so much of what John would like to see us do as learners that I couldn't help but laugh.

That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers.

What is to blame for students' bad writing? According to Warner, the entire context in which it is taught. He rails against school systems that privilege shallow "achievement" over curiosity and learning, a culture of "surveillance and compliance" (including apps that track students' behaviour and report it to parents in real time), an obsession with standardized testing that is fundamentally inimical to thoughtful reading and writing, and a love of faddish psychological theories and worthless digital learning projects.

Book Description

From the inside flap.

There seems to be widespread agreement that--when it comes to the writing skills of college students--we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write , John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform writing-related simulations, which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules--such as the five-paragraph essay--designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.

That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers.--Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed

Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve . . . I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for.--Ryan Boyd, LA Review of Books

Why They Can't Write dissects the underlying causes of why so much writing instruction fails in the American system and it provides tested, practical solutions for doing better. The book is more than a how-to-teach guide, however. It diagnoses several important structural problems in American education, including standardized testing, the allure of educational fads, the abuses of technology-driven solutions, and cruel working conditions for teachers.--Danny Anderson, Sectarian Review

From the Back Cover

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules--such as the five-paragraph essay--designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.

"That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers."--Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed

"Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve . . . I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for."--Ryan Boyd, LA Review of Books

" Why They Can't Write dissects the underlying causes of why so much writing instruction fails in the American system and it provides tested, practical solutions for doing better. The book is more than a how-to-teach guide, however. It diagnoses several important structural problems in American education, including standardized testing, the allure of educational fads, the abuses of technology-driven solutions, and cruel working conditions for teachers."--Danny Anderson, Sectarian Review

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press; Reprint edition (12 May 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1421437988
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1421437989
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.7 x 1.73 x 20.32 cm
• 2,017 in Teaching in Higher & Further Education
• 21,432 in Words, Language & Grammar (Books)
• 27,981 in School Education & Teaching

About the author

John warner.

John Warner is the author of seven books, including most recently "Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities" (Johns Hopkins UP) and "The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing" (Penguin), which draw upon his 20 years of experience as a writer and teaching of writing.

John's first book ("My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook of George W. Bush" co-authored with Kevin Guilfoile) was written primarily in colored pencil and turned into a Washington Post #1 best seller. Since then he’s published a parody of writing advice ("Fondling Your Muse: Infallible Advice from a Published Author to a Writerly Aspirant"), more politically minded humor ("So You Want to Be President?"), a novel ("The Funny Man"), and a collection of short stories ("Tough Day for the Army"). From 2003 to 2008 he edited McSweeney’s Internet Tendency for which he now serves as an editor at large, and writes a weekly column for the Chicago Tribune on books and reading as his alter ego, The Biblioracle. He is a contributing writer to Inside Higher Ed, and can be found on Twitter @biblioracle.

John Warner is a frequent speaker to school and college groups about issues of writing pedagogy and academic labor. You can find more information at johnwarnerwriter.com

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Why they can't write : killing the five-paragraph essay and other necessities

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• Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

In this Book

• John Warner
• Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
• View Citation

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright Page
• Our Writing “Crisis"
• Part One. Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay
• Johnny Could Never Write
• The Writer’s Practice
• The Five-Paragraph Essay
• Part Two. The Other Necessities
• The Problem of Atmosphere: School Sucks
• The Problem of Surveillance
• The Problem of Assessment and Standardization
• The Problem of Education Fads
• The Problem of Technology Hype: Making Teachers Obsolete Any Day Now
• The Problem of Folklore
• pp. 104-112
• The Problem of Precarity
• pp. 113-124
• Part Three. A New Framework
• pp. 125-126
• Why School?
• pp. 127-141
• Increasing Rigor
• pp. 142-145
• Making Writing Meaningful by Making Meaningful Writing
• pp. 146-153
• Writing Experiences
• pp. 154-175
• Increasing Challenges
• pp. 176-184
• Part Four. Unanswered Questions
• pp. 185-186
• What about Academics?
• pp. 187-206
• What about Grammar?
• pp. 207-212
• What about Grades?
• pp. 213-218
• What about the Children?
• pp. 219-226
• What about the Teachers?
• pp. 227-236
• In Conclusion
• pp. 237-242
• Acknowledgments
• pp. 243-246
• pp. 247-264
• pp. 265-274

Additional Information

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Why They Can't Write

John warner.

An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing. There seems to be widespread agreement that—when it comes to the writing skills of college students—we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write , John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and...

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules—such as the five-paragraph essay—designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.

In Why They Can't Write , Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.

Related Books

Elise Hancock foreword by Robert Kanigel

Susan R. Horton

Claire Howell Major

Thomas Richards

edited by Nancy Zimpher and Rebecca Martin

That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers.

Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve... I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for.

Why They Can't Write dissects the underlying causes of why so much writing instruction fails in the American system and it provides tested, practical solutions for doing better. The book is more than a how-to-teach guide, however. It diagnoses several important structural problems in American education, including standardized testing, the allure of educational fads, the abuses of technology-driven solutions, and cruel working conditions for teachers.

I wanted direction on how to better teach writing, and I got it—sample assignments that I can tweak to fit my classroom and discipline in marvelous ways. But I got so much more. I closed the book feeling energized and motivated to go back to the classroom and make changes. In fact my first reaction, as I finished, was 'I have to go write about this!' Which so perfectly encapsulates so much of what John would like to see us do as learners that I couldn't help but laugh.

What  is  to blame for students' bad writing? According to Warner, the entire context in which it is taught. He rails against school systems that privilege shallow "achievement" over curiosity and learning, a culture of "surveillance and compliance" (including apps that track students' behaviour and report it to parents in real time), an obsession with standardized testing that is fundamentally inimical to thoughtful reading and writing, and a love of faddish psychological theories and worthless digital learning projects.

An engaging, compelling, and ambitious book. Warner writes extremely well, and his main claims, driven by his expertise as both a writer and a teacher of writing, are solid and nuanced. An excellent addition to courses and programs in which future professors are being taught to teach, Why They Can't Write should be widely read.

If we really want to inspire young people to write, the tyranny of the five-paragraph essay must first be eradicated. John Warner has decades of experience turning reluctant writers into proficient and empowered ones. Wise writers, teachers, and rhetoricians will listen to this Illinoisian preach.

Why They Can’t Write offers a powerful diagnosis of what’s wrong with how we teach students to write and what we expect that writing to look like—the dreaded 'five paragraph essay,' for starters. But as Warner makes clear, the future of writing instruction doesn’t demand more efficient teaching machines to assess students’ vocabulary and punctuation. Rather, Warner calls for more meaningful writing experiences for students—experiences that encourage inquiry and recognize students’ (and teachers’) humanity.

John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write offers us a plethora of insights into what has derailed education and provides invaluable suggestions for how we can set it back on track again. Where to start? Get rid of the five-paragraph essay and any other formulaic approaches that train students to be bland, passionless writers and thinkers who score points on college entrance exams through pretention, not clarity. Plethora? Why They Can’t Write is common sense, which is to say it is revolutionary. Read it!

From the classic five paragraph essay to standardized writing and techno-hype, Warner has traced the many paths that intersect in our current Land of Bad Writing Instruction. Fortunately, he has mapped an escape route as well. An invaluable book for anyone who cares about creating and nurturing lifetime writers in the classroom.

In this profound-yet-practical, compassionate, funny, and learned book, brilliant teacher-writer-editor John Warner takes on multiple forms of 'folklore'—not just about writing and genres, but also about teaching and learning. Warner, who hones his own writing practice at Inside Higher Ed , laments the ways imitation writing, imitation learning, and... dare I say... imitation living result from harmful teaching. Business as usual: beware! Your days are numbered.

Why They Can't Write is a much-needed guide for all who are concerned about students' ability to write: teachers, parents, employers, and policymakers. Warner offers a concise, comprehensive assessment of the flawed policies that have handicapped writing instruction, and lays out a new map to guide our teaching. The book's engaging mix of research, practical experience, and common sense makes it a valuable resource for anyone who cares about good writing and good teaching.

John Warner invites you to rethink everything you have learned about education, and writing in particular. Accept that invitation. Anyone who teaches writing will finish this book—written in the author's characteristically personable prose—with the foundations for a new approach to education, along with plenty of concrete ideas for engaging new writing assignments for their students.

Book Details

Part I: Introduction Our Writing "Crisis" Johnny Could Never Write The Writer's Practice The Five-Paragraph Essay Part II: The Other Necessities The Problem of Atmosphere The Problem of Surveillance The

Part I: Introduction Our Writing "Crisis" Johnny Could Never Write The Writer's Practice The Five-Paragraph Essay Part II: The Other Necessities The Problem of Atmosphere The Problem of Surveillance The Problem of Assessment and Standardization The Problem of Educational Fads The Problem of Technology Hype The Problem of Folklore The Problem of Precarity Part III: A New Framework Why School? Increasing Rigor The Writer's Practice Making Writing Meaningful by Making Meaningful Writing Writing Experiences Increasing Challenges Part IV: Unanswered Questions What about Academics? What about Grammar? What about Grades? What about the Children? What about the Teachers? In Conclusion Acknowledgments Appendix Notes Index About the Author

with Hopkins Press Books

Josh Bernoff

“Why They Can’t Write”: John Warner’s brilliant analysis of the failure of teaching

Anyone who has had any interaction with education these days — as a student, a teacher, or a parent — is likely to have the feeling that something fundamental is awry. John Warner’s has some good ideas on what’s wrong and how to fix it. His book Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities is as clear, unequivocal, and arresting as a slap in the face. Everyone should read it.

John Warner has taught writing at four colleges and contributes to the Chicago Tribune and Inside Higher Education. Based on that, you’d expect this book to be an analysis of the teaching and learning of the skill of writing. But the problems with writing are emblematic of the problems of education in general — and this book doesn’t stop in the English Composition department.

The tragedy of the five-paragraph essay and standardized writing tests

Start with public school. Simply put, the teaching of writing in high school does not teach students how to write.

Warner starts with the analogy of training wheels on a bicycle. You bike with the training wheels and you imagine that you are learning to ride a bike — but instead, free of the actual need to balance, you are learning only to propel the bicycle forward. Take the training wheels off, and you’re going to fall, whether you’re three years old or 13. All the training wheels do is fool you and delay your learning.

It is the same with the “writing” tasks students undertake in school. The execrable exercise that is the five-paragraph essay is a great example. Students must fill in the blanks in a standardized format that rewards typing, not thinking. But the five-paragraph essay is easy to teach and, more importantly, easy to grade. This allows teachers to be, at least in a cursory examination, more efficient — that is, to teach a greater number of students in the same time period. Thus “education” happens — and as Warner and every other college professor has experienced, the students arrive at college with no idea how to conceive ideas, how to do research, how to organize ideas, how to thread them together, how to satisfy the needs of an audience, and how to delight with the tools of language.

Similarly, Warner decries the little reading and writing exercises that we use to evaluate student writers’ skill with standardized tests. Reading a passage and answering questions about it rewards “close reading” but not the generation of ideas. The essay portion of standardized tests — started in 2005, and abandoned in 2014 — was a test of whether students could generate a bunch of words that a grader could grade quickly. As Warner writes:

The original version of the SAT essay was a timed, handwritten exam with a prompt closed in terms of topic but entirely open in terms of content; furthermore, access to outside sources and research was forbidden, making for a set of conditions under which precisely zero writers work in the real world. . . . The resulting writing was scored in no more than three minutes by anonymous graders hired as temporary workers who had to adhere to production quotas. Imagine Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory, only with students’ blue books instead of bonbons. . . . In fact, to do well on the essay-writing portion of the SAT, Les Perelman, former director of MIT’s Writing Across the Curriculum program and an expert in designing and evaluating writing assessments, had some advice: “Just make stuff up.” “It doesn’t matter if [what you write] is true or not,” Perelman said. “In fact, trying to be true will hold you back.”

The education hype cycle

Many of us are familiar with Gartner’s hype cycle , an insightful deconstruction of how the tech and business media adopts, hypes, and then becomes disillusioned with new technologies, almost independent of their actual merit.

But until Warner pointed it out, I hadn’t realized the same hype cycle applies in education. Only the difference is, instead of companies chasing illusory gains from blockchain or virtual reality, we recreate the entire educational system around the latest educational theory and then subject a whole generation to it.

In teaching, these fads have included “self-control” (along the lines of the now debunked “marshmallow test”), standardized tests and No Child Left Behind, Common Core, “ grit ,” and especially, AI-driven computerized and personalized learning that demoralizes children — but frees up teachers from the drudgery of actually teaching.

Warner’s deconstruction the education hype cycle is insightful and brutally honest:

1. Research uncovers an interesting finding that seems correlated to student “success.” 2. Breathless coverage trumpets a new “revolution” in learning which will unlock all students’ potential regardless of race and economic background. 3. “Success” is defined down to something quantifiable like scores on a standardized test. 4. Very quickly, all nuances surrounding the finding are quickly washed away, so any underlying causes are pushed aside in the interest of raising scores on the test that matters above all. 5. Once the key measurement has been determined, a behaviorist approach is adopted. . . [We] adopt policies that require compliance, rather than developing the underlying skill. 6. The burden of implementing the new curriculum falls entirely on teachers via administrative diktat. Nothing is removed from teachers’ responsibility to make way for this additional requirement . . . Teachers are to be held accountable for how their students perform on these new metrics while being given very little if any assistance in implementing these new programs. 7. Ultimately, nothing much seems to happen. Some students improve on these new metrics; others don’t. To the extent that they change, it’s difficult to correlate those changes to the curriculum. Basically, it’s noise. 8. Enthusiasm fades, and questions arise as to whether the latest approach is sensible. Ultimately, even supporters of the initiative climb off the bandwagon, though the lack of success is almost always blamed on “poor implementation” rather than a flawed premise. 9. A new magic bullet arrives on the scene. Return to Step 1.

The students pay

As Warner describes, this educational environment has created a demoralizing experience for everyone involved. Students are far more likely to say “I hate school,” even though they love actual learning. School is a drudge-filled chore for everyone involved, swallowing students’ motivation and resulting in an epidemic of depression and medication to fix it.

A prescription to fix how we teach writing

Warner is not just complaining about the problem. He has a solution. And it’s remarkably simple. The challenge is how to implement it.

The components of the solution are these:

• Limit the number of students per teacher, and pay the teachers a living wage.
• Assign real-world writing assignments (like a review, or a persuasive argument) and give the students the tools to analyze good examples of people who do those well. They should work inside an actual rhetorical situation with an actual intended audience.
• Focus on writing practice and rewriting based on comments from the teacher. (This means that the teacher has to have the time to generate thoughtful comments.)
• Grade based on quantity of thoughtful writing created, rather than on achieving or approaching perfection. As it turns out (at least in Warner’s classes), the more work the students put in, the more improvement they achieve, and that is worth rewarding.

The result is that students make meaningful writing, which is far more likely to make them better writers than squeezing their work into some pre-determined type of box that has so little to do with the writing they will do in the real world.

I am not doing justice to Warner’s prescription, because there is a lot more detail to it. But I found myself cheering on page after page, because it’s just so much closer to how real writers learn, whether those writers are in high school English classes, college composition classes, or writing reports or copy or emails in corporations.

How I teach writing — and maybe, how we should teach everything

Most of my experience is limited to writing workshops for corporate writers — in which they analyze the bullshit in their own company’s writing and learn to fix it — as well as editing actual writing content.

I sometimes charge $1000 or more for editing a single document. And when I do edit that document, I analyze it in detail, along with the writers’ attitudes that are causing the problems. Some writing teachers that Warner describes are getting less for teaching an entire course full of students than I get for editing a single document.

Obviously, my method does not scale. But some elements do apply. The close read of people’s writing and the thoughtful feedback makes a huge difference.

If we can give students that experience as many times as possible, they will inevitably learn to be better writers.

It’s not automated.

It’s not based on the latest fad.

It’s good old fashioned editing and improving — human-to-human teaching and learning.

I’m convinced that Warner is right about how to fix the way we teach writing.

And I’m wondering how many of these techniques could be applied to how we teach so many other things.

Let’s get off the educational hype cycle and give hands-on teaching another chance. The cure for education’s problems is teachers, not curriculum fads. I’m sure of it.

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Wonderful analysis. It points to the commodification of education (and students?). Education is a human endeavor – just like learning is. At its most effective, it is deeply personal and inter-personal. Our educational system isn’t structured that way.

This is awesome! Though it doesn’t reflect the purpose and function of bicycle training wheels. I think most people don’t remember how they learned on training wheels, but their purpose is actually to let you ride while developing your sense of balance. It becomes obvious when you’re balancing on your own and need them taken off.

Once you get into the meat of the argument, it becomes more convincing. Especially when it calls for smaller class sizes and adequately paid teachers. Dependency-building teaching methods, such as the five-paragraph essay and 3 Rs fundamentals, are pretty much necessary in oversized classes.

Who knows? Maybe some of the gimmicky new methods *could* work better with decently small classes. But that means that small classes and good working conditions for teachers are the only things that could make them worth trying.

Perhaps we should treat students as if they’re apprentices. It works for trade education

Not sure I follow your reference to grit. The referenced article doesn’t seem to debunk the link between grit and academic performance. Am I misreading the article? Or misinterpreting the reason you referred to it?

The book describes the rise and fall of “grit” as a desired measure in pages 79-85. Angela Duckworth and Paul Tough, who popularized it in 2012 and 2013, have backpedaled. Duckworth resigned from the group implementing it in California, saying “I do not think we should be doing this, it is a bad idea.” And Paul Tough agrees with John Warnock that it fails to account for the inequities in the challenges children face before even arriving at the school door.

All my life, real learning occurs with me, when I get the desire. Then I go find the teachers. I just wonder how often this is the case for others.

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Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities Hardcover – Illustrated, Dec 3 2018

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An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing.

There seems to be widespread agreement that—when it comes to the writing skills of college students—we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write , John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules—such as the five-paragraph essay—designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.

In Why They Can't Write , Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.

• ISBN-10 1421427109
• ISBN-13 978-1421427102
• Edition Illustrated
• Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date Dec 3 2018
• Language English
• Dimensions 12.7 x 2.36 x 20.32 cm
• Print length 288 pages
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Product description

"That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers."

"Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve... I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for."

" Why They Can't Write dissects the underlying causes of why so much writing instruction fails in the American system and it provides tested, practical solutions for doing better. The book is more than a how-to-teach guide, however. It diagnoses several important structural problems in American education, including standardized testing, the allure of educational fads, the abuses of technology-driven solutions, and cruel working conditions for teachers."

"I wanted direction on how to better teach writing, and I got it—sample assignments that I can tweak to fit my classroom and discipline in marvelous ways. But I got so much more. I closed the book feeling energized and motivated to go back to the classroom and make changes. In fact my first reaction, as I finished, was 'I have to go write about this!' Which so perfectly encapsulates so much of what John would like to see us do as learners that I couldn't help but laugh."

"What is to blame for students' bad writing? According to Warner, the entire context in which it is taught. He rails against school systems that privilege shallow "achievement" over curiosity and learning, a culture of "surveillance and compliance" (including apps that track students' behaviour and report it to parents in real time), an obsession with standardized testing that is fundamentally inimical to thoughtful reading and writing, and a love of faddish psychological theories and worthless digital learning projects."

"An engaging, compelling, and ambitious book. Warner writes extremely well, and his main claims, driven by his expertise as both a writer and a teacher of writing, are solid and nuanced. An excellent addition to courses and programs in which future professors are being taught to teach, Why They Can't Write should be widely read."

"If we really want to inspire young people to write, the tyranny of the five-paragraph essay must first be eradicated. John Warner has decades of experience turning reluctant writers into proficient and empowered ones. Wise writers, teachers, and rhetoricians will listen to this Illinoisian preach."

" Why They Can’t Write offers a powerful diagnosis of what’s wrong with how we teach students to write and what we expect that writing to look like—the dreaded 'five paragraph essay,' for starters. But as Warner makes clear, the future of writing instruction doesn’t demand more efficient teaching machines to assess students’ vocabulary and punctuation. Rather, Warner calls for more meaningful writing experiences for students—experiences that encourage inquiry and recognize students’ (and teachers’) humanity."

"John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write offers us a plethora of insights into what has derailed education and provides invaluable suggestions for how we can set it back on track again. Where to start? Get rid of the five-paragraph essay and any other formulaic approaches that train students to be bland, passionless writers and thinkers who score points on college entrance exams through pretention, not clarity. Plethora? Why They Can’t Write is common sense, which is to say it is revolutionary. Read it!"

"From the classic five paragraph essay to standardized writing and techno-hype, Warner has traced the many paths that intersect in our current Land of Bad Writing Instruction. Fortunately, he has mapped an escape route as well. An invaluable book for anyone who cares about creating and nurturing lifetime writers in the classroom."

"In this profound-yet-practical, compassionate, funny, and learned book, brilliant teacher-writer-editor John Warner takes on multiple forms of 'folklore'—not just about writing and genres, but also about teaching and learning. Warner, who hones his own writing practice at Inside Higher Ed , laments the ways imitation writing, imitation learning, and... dare I say... imitation living result from harmful teaching. Business as usual: beware! Your days are numbered."

" Why They Can't Write is a much-needed guide for all who are concerned about students' ability to write: teachers, parents, employers, and policymakers. Warner offers a concise, comprehensive assessment of the flawed policies that have handicapped writing instruction, and lays out a new map to guide our teaching. The book's engaging mix of research, practical experience, and common sense makes it a valuable resource for anyone who cares about good writing and good teaching."

"John Warner invites you to rethink everything you have learned about education, and writing in particular. Accept that invitation. Anyone who teaches writing will finish this book—written in the author's characteristically personable prose—with the foundations for a new approach to education, along with plenty of concrete ideas for engaging new writing assignments for their students."

Book Description

From the inside flap.

There seems to be widespread agreement that--when it comes to the writing skills of college students--we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write , John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform writing-related simulations, which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules--such as the five-paragraph essay--designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.

That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers.--Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed

Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve . . . I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for.--Ryan Boyd, LA Review of Books

Why They Can't Write dissects the underlying causes of why so much writing instruction fails in the American system and it provides tested, practical solutions for doing better. The book is more than a how-to-teach guide, however. It diagnoses several important structural problems in American education, including standardized testing, the allure of educational fads, the abuses of technology-driven solutions, and cruel working conditions for teachers.--Danny Anderson, Sectarian Review

From the Back Cover

"That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers."—Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed

"Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve... I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for."—Ryan Boyd, LA Review of Books

" Why They Can't Write dissects the underlying causes of why so much writing instruction fails in the American system and it provides tested, practical solutions for doing better. The book is more than a how-to-teach guide, however. It diagnoses several important structural problems in American education, including standardized testing, the allure of educational fads, the abuses of technology-driven solutions, and cruel working conditions for teachers."—Danny Anderson, Sectarian Review

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press; Illustrated edition (Dec 3 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1421427109
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1421427102
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 390 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.7 x 2.36 x 20.32 cm
• #421 in Rhetoric (Books)
• #486 in Linguistics Textbooks
• #876 in Language Arts Teaching Materials

About the author

John warner.

John Warner is the author of seven books, including most recently "Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities" (Johns Hopkins UP) and "The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing" (Penguin), which draw upon his 20 years of experience as a writer and teaching of writing.

John's first book ("My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook of George W. Bush" co-authored with Kevin Guilfoile) was written primarily in colored pencil and turned into a Washington Post #1 best seller. Since then he’s published a parody of writing advice ("Fondling Your Muse: Infallible Advice from a Published Author to a Writerly Aspirant"), more politically minded humor ("So You Want to Be President?"), a novel ("The Funny Man"), and a collection of short stories ("Tough Day for the Army"). From 2003 to 2008 he edited McSweeney’s Internet Tendency for which he now serves as an editor at large, and writes a weekly column for the Chicago Tribune on books and reading as his alter ego, The Biblioracle. He is a contributing writer to Inside Higher Ed, and can be found on Twitter @biblioracle.

John Warner is a frequent speaker to school and college groups about issues of writing pedagogy and academic labor. You can find more information at johnwarnerwriter.com

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Chapter 2: The Purpose of School

Killing the five-paragraph essay interview.

• Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay Interview. Authored by : Joshua Dickinson. Provided by : Jefferson Community College. Located at : http://www.sunyjefferson.edu . Project : Practical Foundations and Principles for Teaching. License : CC0: No Rights Reserved

The Five-Paragraph Essay: A Tool—Not a Rule

My background is in teaching college-level writing. I have a focus on teaching remedial classes, so I often had students in my classroom who had negative past experiences with writing. Much of my job was helping them to unlearn “rules” about writing that they had picked up over the years and create a more solid foundation that was focused on writing as a way to communicate first and foremost.

Unlearning the Five-Paragraph Essay

One of the most prickly rules to undo was dogmatic adherence to the five-paragraph essay. Many of my college students mistakenly believed that all “school writing” came in five-paragraph form. There was an introduction that laid out three points, those three points were explored in a paragraph each, and a conclusion summarized what the three points covered. Easy. Simple. Predictable.

It led to students trying to shoehorn three or four topics into a single paragraph because five paragraphs simply was not enough to cover everything. It led to students skipping huge portions of their ideas because they thought they had “too much” for an essay. It led to students stretching simple reflections that could have been covered in a paragraph or two into five paragraphs with a stilted framework. It led, in short, to bad writing.

Experts Agree the Five-Paragraph Essay is Flawed

I’m not the only one who feels this way about the five-paragraph essay. In fact, many people feel much stronger animosity toward the device than I do.

Writer John Warner has an essay that appeared in Inside Higher Ed titled quite simply “ Kill the 5-Paragraph Essay. ” Lest you think that’s just a click-bait title and the contents are actually more nuanced, here’s the opening line: “Let’s just go ahead and kill the 5-paragraph essay at all levels, everywhere.”

Susan Knoppow has similarly harsh words and points out that experts in writing pedagogy have been calling for an end to the practice for decades. She also points out something that I think is key to the whole conversation:

Yes, the five-paragraph format makes explaining expository writing straightforward. And in this age of rubrics and standardization, it makes correcting papers easy.

The five-paragraph essay as it is currently used is often more about making grading easier on teachers bound to specific rubrics (or, perhaps more often, standardized test graders who never even instruct the humans who produced the writing they evaluate) than it is about providing solid writing foundations for a life of inquiry and exploration.

Perhaps it is this reality that leads Ray Salazar to say the “five-paragraph essay is rudimentary, unengaging, and useless.”

Is it Really So Bad?

I’m inclined to agree with these writers. The five-paragraph essay isn’t a real thing. It’s a construct designed to provide instruction of a particular writing quality, and it should not dictate the final product of any writing—at any level.

I’d go so far as to say that teachers should never assign a “five-paragraph essay” as part of their writing instruction. In fact, while there is some merit to holding students to strict length limits as a practice in discipline and meeting audience expectations, there is very little reason to ever tell a writer how many paragraphs their finished paper needs to be.

However, I do not go so far as to say that the five-paragraph essay needs to be eliminated entirely. I think it serves a specific purpose at a particular point in writing development.

It’s like training wheels on a bicycle. You don’t want them on there forever, but if you have a writer who is struggling to keep their balance, it can provide them with the confidence they need to get up and running more smoothly.

Using the Five-Paragraph Essay as a Tool

First, it’s important that teachers realize they never need to teach the five-paragraph essay. Just as some bike riders can go from gliding to pedaling without ever using an intermediary step (and there are even tiny little glider bikes without pedals designed specifically for this purpose), many writers can grasp the concepts of organization and paragraph separation without a five-paragraph essay to lay it out for them.

There’s nothing wrong with using the five-paragraph essay as a tool to make that illustration clearer, however. Students are not going to be forever scarred if they get five-paragraph essay examples as part of the many types of writing they see. They aren’t going to be doomed to write formulaic prose the rest of their lives if they write a five-paragraph essay to help them practice organization in late elementary school.

As long as teachers make it clear that the five-paragraph essay is a tool and not a rule, it can be a useful way to illustrate an important concept. Organization matters and paragraphs should be divided based on the topics they present rather than their length.

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The Five-Paragraph Essay Must Die

In the fourth century, a Christian grammar teacher named Cassian  in the central Italian town of Imola was so scathingly critical toward his students that they attacked him. The students decided to smash their wax tablets on his face and then “launch at him the sharp iron pricks which by scratching strokes the wax is written upon,” until “two hundred hands have pierced him all over his body.”

Cassian died as a martyr, murdered by pagan students with bad grammar. In other words, if you think kids these days can’t write, you’re in the good company of frustrated teachers and parents going back at least a couple thousand years.

In Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities , John Warner dispenses with arguments that the current moment of compositional crisis is related to screen time, text-speak, Twitter, or the idea that kids have become snowflakes who want participation trophies. There are, however, specific factors that have erected specific challenges to teaching writing in 2018; these include standardized testing, over-reliance on teaching grammar instead of writing, reliance on formulaic structure (i.e. those five-paragraph beasts), classroom surveillance, and college labor conditions. Warner examines the systemic causes in K-12 education that propel students into college without having discovered much about themselves as writers. Having explained the problems, Warner turns to solutions. The second half of the book offers his philosophical approach to teaching writing, honed over 18 years teaching first-year-writing classes at various schools, paired with practical exercises. Warner’s next book, The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing , a book of exercises, will be coming out next February. Together, they offer his assessment of the problems and plan for transforming how we teach college writing in higher education.

Warner spoke to Pacific Standard about his career teaching writing, his two books, and the biggest challenges facing would-be writers and their instructors today.

So why can’t Johnny write?

The complaint is eternal. People have always been complaining that “Johnny can’t write.” The present issue is not so much the matter of writing skills; students have the same skills as ever. Developing writers need help developing. If we focus on correctness, we’re going to have error.

One of the messages of the book is that everybody has some writer inside of them, if you can get them to display it.

So it’s not Twitter’s fault?

No, it’s not! And it’s not the skills of students, but the attitudes. Writing has become something they do for the purposes of school assessment, instructed into a highly scripted structure (the five-paragraph essay) that passes surface muster but has no depth. I see a lot of things to worry about.

(Photo: Johns Hopkins University Press)

The problem of atmosphere: I discuss the crisis of student mental health that I think is largely attributable to what happens in school. Of course [there are things like] bullying, but in a lot of cases it’s the day-to-day reality of the pressures of school and the conditions in which they are expected to achieve.

The problem of surveillance: how our students are tracked, and watched, and judged. The problems of writing for standardized tests. The problem of “education folklore” and fads. The conditions under which teachers are working are not conducive to students. Too little autonomy, too little freedom.

We almost couldn’t be doing worse in terms of the systems and conditions in which we expect students to learn to write.

Why are these issues bad for writing in particular and not, for example, for math?

Surveillance is bad. The pressure is bad. The damage to student mental health is one of my chief worries. They come into college quite damaged by school. And they perceive themselves as survivors in a battle. It’s particularly bad for writing because so much of writing is the ability to take a risk, to set a goal and risk failure. Falling short of your goal is nonetheless a noble enterprise that gets you up to try again. That’s the writer’s work.

Because writing is different from other kinds of work?

I view writing as thinking, and different types of writing involve different types of thinking. The process of writing reveals that which you meant to say. The brain must be free to do the activity. And we do so much against allowing students to free their brains. By judging, by setting up standardized [procedures], by making the stakes too high—there’s no lack of ability among students even in a single semester in a first-year writing course.

So why isn’t the five-paragraph essay a useful starting point? Why isn’t it like doing scales before playing music, or practicing free throws before playing basketball?

The danger is the prescriptive process that the use of the five-paragraph essay privileges. Students are given rules—not just parts of speech and subject-verb agreement rules—but [they are told] all paragraphs should have five to seven sentences. The last paragraph should start, “In conclusion,” then summarize the previous three paragraphs. In a 500-word essay, the audience hasn’t forgotten what you’ve said! So if there’s a specific purpose where a five-paragraph essay is useful, go nuts.

Students need to be given experience wrestling with the full rhetorical purposes of writing. Doing that allows them to develop the kinds of thinking that writers do [and] makes them far more amenable to examining the quality of the sentences.

I write bad sentences all the time in my drafts. I write ungrammatical sentences. That’s how I believe how most writers work. So that’s what I want students doing.

A lot of what I talk about in the book a matter of re-orienting our values. The publisher hype calls The Writer’s Practice revolutionary. I see it as the opposite. I have an assignment that my third-grade teacher did about the components of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It’s not a revolution. It’s stripping away the apparatus of school and getting back to essence.

Who teaches college writing? In your journalism and in the book,  you link bad labor practices with poor outcomes .

The conditions under which the vast majority of writing teachers work are out of whack with disciplinary recommendations, which are not luxurious. Teaching three sections of 20 students per semester is a very full-time load. That’s 60 [students]. Now imagine 120, which is pretty routine at community colleges and other places. [General education courses like first-year writing] deserve resources because they address questions like acculturation to college, retention, and prep for other courses. To shunt off first-year writing to a contingent workforce makes no sense.

You’ve argued against the general “kids these days” mentality by pointing to decades of concern about this kind of thing, dating back to the famous 1955 Time   article, “Why Johnny Can’t Read?” But we are in a very peculiar hyperlexic and hyperscribal moment , in which people are reading and writing more words per day than ever before in human history. Does that have an effect on education?

We are writing more than ever, so we need to get better about the things that writing involves. It’s absolutely in play when we’re tweeting, confined to 280 characters. In The Writer’s Practice , each assignment has a remix, where you have to take what you’ve done and remix it for a different audience or medium. Take a research paper and boil it down to a tweet—absolutely vital to survive in today’s day and age. If you go to work in a business that has a Slack channel and you’re relating to your colleagues, you could step into some mess at any moment with careless writing. Also, people need to become a more critical reader of these things. We are bombarded with text and images. My belief is we need to practice as many ways of working as possible.

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