The Most Important Skill

     Arguably the most important skill I have learned in the first quarter of English came from the unit on writing a five-part-paragraph analyzing To Kill A Mockingbird, which involved writing, editing, and listening to the paragraphs. This unit came and went in October but the techniques learned have not. Not only is knowing the format itself important, but the editing techniques and writing styles are equally so.

     By simple merit of being the standard short-paragraph form, knowing how to write a five-part-paragraph is a necessary. However, in all expository writing, some variation on concrete details and commentary will pop up. Therefore, understanding how to utilize these, how to intersperse your concrete details from the entire text, how to comment without summarizing, and how to make both build upon the theme, is crucial in order to write about literature.

     Another hugely important aspect of learning how to write a five part paragraph was learning how to critique and edit the paragraphs of others as well as one's own. Although it initially appears short and simple, because of its size, a five-part-paragraph must be streamlined, with every idiom, device, and word contributing to its overall theme. One must first understand in detail all of the elements in the writing in order to critique it, and even then, to forge a better paragraph, one must be able to look critically at their creation and say, "A little more to the left."


One side effect of being surrounded by all of the interpretations of To Kill a Mockingbird within the five-part-paragraphs is that I now view each book I read as a story with an innate meaning to life as well as a tale. When I read The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, and began wondering how on earth the reader was intended to sympathize with the seemingly deranged Count, I realized that, rather than the Count, it was the message about revenge that was important in the novel. In short, through my study of five-part-paragraphs, I have grown as a writer and a reader.

Lobsters

     One idea from the classroom discussion of "Lobsters," by Howard Nemerov that interested me was the comparison of the lobsters to philosophers in their ivory towers. The comparison is not so far-fetched. Like philosophers, lobsters appear from the outside to be entirely shut off from the outside world in a dreamlike state, crawling through time with no apparent regard for the rest of the world. Similarly, philosophers might also appear to an observer to be nothing more than extremely lazy humans. However, both are more than daydreamers, the lobsters with their "imperial claws" and "beauty of strangeness," the philosophers with their thoughts and ideas.

      It would be an understatement to say that this influenced my view of the poem. I started to realize that the lobsters themselves were more than victims, and that the author was saying a bit more than an animal-rights statement. Rather, I began grasping at the deeper ideas of the poem, like death, ignorance, and the cyclic nature of the world. The comparison of lobsters to philosophers opened up my eyes to the greater depths of the poem.

Five Part Paragraphs

     To write a quality 5-part-paragraph, a writer needs to do many things. Two of the most important, and most commonly forgotten, are to really think about the topic of the paragraph and to pay attention to the rubric. Many of the paragraphs that have been read in class suffer because the topic of the paragraph is too broad, the concrete details do not relate to the topic sentence, or the topic does not present enough material to work with. All of these problems relate to an insufficient amount of thought being put into the creation of the topic. Many people try to write based on the first topic that comes into their head. Although occasionally this may be effective, most often the best idea is not the first one, but the third, fifth, or even eighth topic that they think of. In addition to this, many of the remaining errors simply relate to the rubric itself. Some people forget a transition, or add a bit of extra information in their conclusion, or have too much commentary. All of these problems can be solved by simply checking the paragraph against the checklist for disparities. The errors become simple to fix in this way.

     In my own case, I probably need to check my paragraph for simple errors a bit more as well as ensure that my topic is completely cohesive. At first, my current 5-part-paragraph jumped between several points sporadically, not emphasizing any of them. In the future, I must try and keep my paragraph on a single, apparent idea, therefore bypassing this problem. Also, several of the problems with my paragraph, such as a few punctuation errors, could have been fixed just by checking the paragraph thoroughly. These errors are really unnecessary. With a few careful changes, I can significantly improve my 5-part-paragraph.