The five paragraph essay has been derided as training wheels, and no serious scientist would ever write a five paragraph paper for publication in a journal. Those of us who think of ourselves as good writers enjoy what Paul Graham has to say about essays: they should be means of deeply exploring a line of thinking. I think that writing can form the basis of excellent self exploration, and even excellent theoretical exploration. However, I believe that always aiming to write high caliber, self exploring blog entries is inappropriate. We are scientist. Unlike professional essayists, our careers depend on making and arguing statements. Also unlike the mythical essayist, we do not have infinite time to write our ideas. We should use our blog entries as venues for practicing a simple construction of ideas and arguments.
Paul Graham argues that an essay should simply be an exploration of an idea. Paul first argues that essays should be about real life instead of English literature, a point with which nobody here will argue. His second point is that “a real essay doesn’t take a position and then defend it.” The sorts of essays that get published in literary magazines lead you artistically from one idea to the next. Essays present and unpack a series of ideas, unpacking them quickly or slowly as necessary, and drawing connections between them and conclusions that follow. Literary essays are a joy to read. Unfortunately, we are not essayists.
Good essays take time and effort to write. Paul Graham says of his very own essay (about essays) that it took quite a while to write. His oldest draft on display had already seen days worth of work, and he doesn’t state how long it took to reach the finished product. There is a venue for such polish—a statement of research plans used in job applications, for example—but our blog entries are not such a place. Blog entries need to be short yet substantive. If we cannot map out the logical flow from the very beginning, we will take too much time in writing and revising our work. This is why I advocate aiming for the five-paragraph format for our blog entries.
The goal for our blogs is to practice briefly explaining a single point. Celia Eliot is a technical writer in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois. She has helped organize and write dozens, possibly hundreds, of papers and grant proposals. I trust her opinion about technical writing above the opinion of almost anybody else I know. In one of her many brief presentations available from her website, she argues that carefully constructed paragraphs “create a logical structure for your argument and lead the reader directly to the conclusions you want him or her to reach.” She then goes on to explain how to use full-sentence outlining to quickly organize your thoughts into a logical story. She explains a simple form for building the paragraphs that develop from your full-sentence outlines. Celia makes good arguments for her approach and offers a simple example for how to execute it. Read what she has to say and try using her approach for your next blog. I promise you will learn something, even if it’s only the solar physics in her example. If we could master this basic approach to writing, our blogs would be quick and easy, and our technical writing would benefit from these practices, too.
We are neither essayists nor poets. We do, however, need to be able to quickly write a few paragraphs that convey our ideas. I have advocated the five paragraph essay not because it is the most expressive or most respected form of writing. Rather, I believe that by aiming for a constrained style lets us focus on the elements of our writing that are most need of our work: planning, simplicity, and speed. Using an analogy from mathematics, you should master arithmetic before you try to master differential equations.
— David Mertens