College writing

This handout will help you figure out what your college instructors expect when they give you a writing assignment. It will tell you how and why to move beyond the five-paragraph essays you learned to write in high school and start writing essays that are more analytical and more flexible.

Once you know what college instructors are looking for, you can see some of the reasons why five-paragraph essays don’t work so well for college writing: Five-paragraph essays often do a poor job of setting up a framework, or context, that helps the reader understand what the author is trying to say.

First, the arguments that prove you would be a brilliant addition to the college life. The whole point of essay is to convince the committee in your uniqueness and skills. Writing an argumentative essay yourself will require plenty of time. You can't just sit in front of your laptop and make a good point in a couple of hours.

Writers who follow the five-paragraph model tend to repeat sentences or phrases from the introduction in topic sentences for paragraphs, rather than writing topic sentences that tie their three “points” together into a coherent argument. Repetitive writing doesn’t help to move an argument along, and it’s no fun to read.