Point of view: in teaching composition, 'formulaic' is not a four-letter word *.

One of the least-examined assumptions among academics today is that being "formulaic"--using established formulas to structure thought--is always a bad thing. In the field of rhetoric and composition, to say that a mode of writing instruction is formulaic is to charge it with having a "cookie cutter" quality: the student writer presumably inserts raw material into a mold, and the product automatically comes out, no thought required.

That is the charge commonly leveled against the five-paragraph essay that has long been a dominant model for high-school writing. Specifically, it is said that the five-paragraph formula forces students to conform to a mechanical routine that chokes the life out of writing, encouraging them not to wrestle with ideas but to conform to a one-size-fits-all straitjacket.

Dennis Baron, a linguist and English professor, complains that the SAT's "formulaic approach will reverse decades of progress in literacy instruction and ultimately turn students into intellectual automatons." Like many academics, Baron uses "formulaic" pejoratively, as if the word always merits an eye-roiling grimace.

There are several problems with this formulaphobia. For one thing, not all formulas function in the same deadening way. Furthermore, the idea that formulas in themselves are bad--or that we could possibly communicate in some formula-free way--is mistaken. Formulas, less invidiously called conventions, pervade everything we do.

Try writing a sonnet, doing the cha-cha, saying "Hi, how are you?" or "I love you," or even questioning the value of formulas without relying on established forms that you didn't invent. Far from shutting down thought and stifling creativity, formulas structure thought and feeling and make creativity possible. Most important, if we try to reject formulas altogether, we forfeit a valuable tool for clarifying academic mysteries to large numbers of students. The proper antidote to the five-paragraph formula is not to reject formulas as such, but to look for ones that more closely capture the way critical thinking really operates. The reason the five-paragraph essay has survived as long as it has, we suspect, is that it gives students who need it a series of clear operations to perform: offer an introductory claim followed by three supporting paragraphs and then a conclusion that restates and deepens the claim.

The downside of this thesis/evidence formula, however, is that it has the student perform those important maneuvers in an isolation booth, without engaging other people. Thus it bypasses one of the most important rhetorical requirements: that we enter the social fray, presenting what others have said not as an afterthought or as mere support for our own argument, but as our argument's motivating source, its very reason for being.

The problem with the five-paragraph essay, then, is not that it is a cookie cutter, but that it is the wrong type of cookie cutter; the cookies you make with it won't be your best. What critics of the five-paragraph model should be objecting to is not that it is a formula, but that it is a weak formula, one that produces arguments that are disengaged and decontextualized, severed from any social mission or context. Here, we suspect, is what Baron really finds troubling--and he may be right--in the new SAT writing test: not that it's formulaic, but that it's deadeningly asocial and results in a monologue.