On the virtues of formulaic writing

When I was on the English faculty at a small University several years ago, I was talking with a student in my office one day when I overheard another instructor explaining to her class that she never really knew how to be a good writer until she had an epiphany in graduate school. That is where she discovered that there is a formula to all good writing, and that formula was the five paragraph essay.

She went on to say that she had always made A’s on her papers, but that she never felt like she knew what she was doing until she discovered "the formula."

I let out a groan that the other instructor was sure to hear, followed by a string of unflattering comments, expletives not deleted. All I can say is that she wouldn’t have made many A’s writing five-paragraph essays where I went to grad school…

Good writing is not something that can just be plugged into a template or formula. It must be organic and then painstakingly evaluated, revised, and polished. That is not to say that there are no rules or guidelines, but what rules there are should be treated more as guidelines.

Indeed, it is often said that you must know the rules before you can break them successfully, and there might be some truth to that, and if that is the case, learning how to break them is an important step in becoming a better writer.