Five Paragraph Essays: A Blessing or a Curse I would like to say that my style as a writer has come a long way. However, I wouldn't say that I may still have a lot more to do. My sophomore year of high school was the golden year for five-paragraph essays. What I mean is that I was constantly writing essays in a five-paragraph format, and looking back, I see that as a blessing and a curse. It was a gift because writing a five-paragraph essay became extremely easy for me. However, it was a remedy because writing in another form became much more difficult. It is therefore not surprising that my two rhetorical analysis articles were originally written as a five-paragraph essay. Plus, I've never been a fan of revising, so when it came to making changes, I either did the bare minimum or made no changes at all. However, this time I made very drastic changes to paper one and paper two. As part of this reflection, I would like to discuss how this literary condition limited my writing for my first and second articles. I would also like to discuss the changes I made to both articles to free myself from the 5 paragraph chains. First of all, for the first article, I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to discuss. However, I struggled to organize these ideas and so resorted to my five-paragraph security blanket. For example, when I wrote the first article, I had four different rhetorical topics I wanted to discuss, kairos, present tense language, intrinsic evidence, and extrinsic evidence, but I limited myself to just three paragraphs of body, forcing me to combine intrinsic and extrinsic elements. evidence in a single paragraph. This also limited the amount of detail I could provide for each idea. During the revision process, I tried to keep the center of the paper......in the first paper, I also changed the layout of my paragraphs to make my newly organized ideas flow more easily. Overall, I feel that the changes I made have strengthened my article as a whole. In conclusion, I'm glad I took the time to review my articles. I was stuck in a five-paragraph writing mindset and I think that really hurt the overall outcome of my articles. I also don't think I would have realized this problem if I hadn't gone back through each article and tried to make changes. I believe that restructuring my articles, and the additional information and analysis I was able to bring to them through the new and improved structure, has made my articles stronger and more organized. So, as I said earlier, the five-paragraph essay form is a blessing and a curse; a curse because I can easily get stuck in one way of writing, but a blessing because it gives me a good starting point.