The Literary Conformist - Excerpt

MDB (my darling biologist) told me that I should consider writing a book. To get started, I used an assignment from my class which concerned using memoir writing to teach a lesson about something in writing. I had to write this essay for my Peer Tudoring in Writing class, and in it I discussed the use/lessness of the Five-Paragraph essay format. Here's an excerpt:

When I trudged into Mr. Prytco’s 7th grade Language Arts class, this is what I saw marked on a poster hanging over the white board. It summed up what we had been repeatedly regurgitating for the past two weeks. Today we had a test on the five-paragraph essay form, something which Mr. Prytco guaranteed we’d be using for the rest of our god-given lives.

Mr. Prytco pushed his round, thick glasses up his huge honker, scratched his balding head, and ordered the class to get into their seats. We were, after all, a group of middle schoolers, capable of horrendous crimes and youthful violations. I staggered to my desk under the weight of my backpack and saw that the tests were already passed out, face-down. Mr. Prytco solemnly covered up the poster on the board and began the timer.

We had five minutes to fill in the blank spots on our test that correlated to the poster we’d all just seen, the poster that had been slowly carved – no, gouged – into our brains. I filled the blank lines quickly, although I accidentally spelled ‘clincher,’ ‘clicher’ and had to cross it out in pen and rewrite it. I wrote fast and finished before my classmates. I turned my head toward Sean Briggeman (the cute boy across the desk from me) and saw him scrawling away on his test, stopping every moment or two to look up into the air to think. Clearly, although cute, he lacked a brain. I put my head down on my desk and waited for everyone else.

I began to ponder this 5-Paragraph essay form. None of the novels I’d read had used this. Little Women, Redwall, Harry Potter… none of these had been so formulaic. I did not understand the value of this format. It was so restricting and confining. I began to wonder what would happen if I had more than three main ideas that I wanted to talk about. How could I put a blank spot in that holy construct? But before I could go about answering this question the timer pierced the air with several eardrum destroying rings.

Lifting my head, I saw Sean quickly scribble in the final blank line and glance up at Mr. Prytco, quite proud to have gotten away with it. Mr. Prytco paced through the islands of desks and collected the tests, uttering monotonously something concerning the value of the lesson we had hopefully just learned. He repeated confidently that the 5-Paragraph essay form was the most important thing we could learn in Language Arts, and that he would be looking for it in all of our future essays. I thought about asking where a fourth main idea, if it existed, would fall in the format but thought better of it. If asked, Mr. Prytco would go off on a tangent in his dreadful Ben Stein voice. So, I let my question plunge to the back of my mind and forgot about my concerns in the 5-Paragraph form

___________________________________________________________________

I got an A on this paper, a perfect score of 20/20. After this section I preceeded to explain what it was I learned from this experience (which was the assignment) and make some conclusions after observing both sides of the argument. I do feel that it was a deserved grade, and I really like my paper. Thus why I have included it here. You should see the horrendous draft I just turned in for our second paper, which concerns teaching students how to write biology lab reports. It is completely disorganized and I wouldn't show its pages to a drosophila, nevermind my friends and family.

My professor is a memoir writer and I think that's why we had this assignment. I like memoir writing and as I do it I feel as though I could one day be David Sedaris or Agusten Burroughs. Its a way of storytelling that invigorates the reader AND writer. It's neat.