You Cannot Live on Hamburger Alone: Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay Form

The major limitation the five-paragraph essay format is that it puts form before content. That presupposition creates  problems at the university level: the limiting of ideas, the illusion of purposeful structure, and general repetitiveness. You may know this form it by its other name: the hamburger model. A quick examination of a “hamburger” outline for an essay on Charles Justice’s “The Ultimate Communications App,” will reveal many of the limitations inherent in the five-paragraph essay, especially as it relates to the conclusion: