Five Paragraph Essays: A Blessing or a Curse I would like to say that my writing style has come a long way. However, I wouldn't say I might still have a long way to go. 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 both a blessing and a curse. It was a gift because writing a five-paragraph essay became extremely easy for me. Yet it was a cure because writing in any other form became much more difficult. Thus, it is not surprising that my two rhetorical analysis articles were originally written in the form of a five-paragraph essay. I've also never been a fan of editing, so when it came to making changes I either did the bare minimum or didn't make any changes at all. However, this time I made very drastic changes to both Book One and Book Two. Within this reflection I would like to discuss how this literary condition limited my writing for both the first and second articles. I would also like to discuss the changes I made to both documents to free myself from the shackles of 5 paragraphs. First of all, for the first paper I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to discuss. However, I had trouble organizing these ideas, so I resorted to my five-paragraph security blanket. For example, when I first wrote the first article I had four different rhetorical topics I wanted to discuss, kairos, present tense language, intrinsic and extrinsic proofs, but I limited myself to just three body paragraphs, forcing me to combine intrinsic and extrinsic. demonstrations in one paragraph. This also limited the amount of detail I could provide for each idea. During the revision process I attempted to keep the middle of the paper... on the first paper, I also changed the layout of my paragraphs to make my newly organized ideas flow more smoothly. Overall, I feel that the changes I made 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 essay mentality and I feel like it 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 and looked at each article and attempted to make changes. I believe that the restructuring of my documents, and the additional information and analysis I have been able to include thanks to the new and improved structure, has made my documents stronger and more organized. So, as I stated earlier, the five-paragraph essay form is a blessing and a curse; a curse because I can easily get stuck in a certain way of writing, but a blessing because it gives me a good starting point.