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Perfect Essay In High School Writing

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Throughout all of high school, students are taught in minimal ways to produce “perfect” essays and present them so that when they get to college they can pass their classes. This means that high school teachers only teach them to write so specifically and in such a hard structured manner, that many students hardly ever learn to write papers that flow. In high school, I always wrote really nice papers that my teachers enjoyed grading, however, I always hated writing them because if I did not use the cookie cutter format that they gave us, my teachers would not accept the work. The format that I am referring to goes as follows: hook, introduction, and thesis for paragraph one, three body paragraphs with two examples to support your thesis in each paragraph, and finally a conclusion ("Essay Template"). In total, there were five paragraphs, never any more, and never any less. The hook was always supposed to be a quote related to the topic or a factual piece of information …show more content…
Writing using a five paragraph template can spread information out using much detail and evidence, therefore when these students are assigned small papers, they cannot get a single thought together because they are so used to having a huge amount of information to write with. In an excerpt from “What is Wrong with High-School English?” published in 1922, a student says “I wrote good themes, as to the material used, with very little preparation. The study of literature was easily bluffed…”. This is due to the lack of creativity allowed to the students to write as they please. It is easy to expand on a single thought for five paragraphs as long as you stick to the format, because no matter what the content is, the high school teacher will only pay attention (mostly) to the perfect five paragraphs you

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