How to Teach Writing Using the 5C Paragraph (It’s Easier than You Think)

Learning to teach writing is just about as hard as learning to write itself, and is one of the biggest challenges we face as English teachers. It’s definitely the portion of our curriculum we struggled with most and it took us a long time to feel confident in our abilities. We looked for all kinds of creative and engaging ways to teach writing, trying out every strategy we could find that promised to transform our struggling students into star writers, but, compared to the glowing reviews from teachers whose students engaged in meaningful workshops and peer review sessions, we often felt like failures (or at least very mediocre).

When we got back to basics, however, focusing on how to teach paragraph writing, rather than the essay as a whole, we began to experience more success. Instead of focusing our attention on teaching strategies for brainstorming and outlining, or prioritizing creative writing, all valuable pursuits in their own right, we decided to help our students work toward mastery of the three elements you’ll find in any writing strategy or rubric: claim, evidence, and commentary (which, by the way, align perfectly with the College Board’s scoring rubrics for AP English Language and AP English Literature).

By focusing more narrowly on how to teach paragraph writing, we were able to develop a systematic approach that students could use on anything from short-answer responses to body paragraphs in essays. This more narrow approach allowed our students to practice more frequently, and because the responses were shorter, we were able to provide feedback quickly. Frequency and feedback, the two Fs that are often stumbling blocks when we teach writing, were addressed by focusing on the paragraph.

Of course, the basic elements of the approach we used to teach writing aren’t groundbreaking: Jane Schaffer’s model has long been a favorite among English teachers, and we used the TEPAC model created by Sonja Munévar Gagnon during her time at the San Diego County Office of Education for years. The more we used these strategies to teach writing, however, the more we felt we needed to encourage our students to develop skills not explicitly addressed by these models, so we combined and adapted them to meet the needs of our students. We turned this into a model called the 5Cs.

Teach Writing Using the 5Cs

Claim Sentence

Whether you refer to it as a claim or a topic sentence, it’s the starting place for any lesson on how to teach paragraph writing. For a single paragraph response, our goal was for students to write an arguable statement that clearly answered all parts of the question in the prompt. From the beginning of the school year, we sent back for revision (this is an important part of helping students internalize the structure) any response that did not meet this description, and most students learned quickly the importance of this single sentence and could articulate a claim that clearly addressed the task or question.

Concrete Evidence Sentence

We asked students to next provide a piece of textual evidence that clearly supported the specific claim they made in the claim sentence. We required that these quotations be accurately punctuated, integrated, and cited, and as we refined our model, we required students to provide evidence that shows, rather than tells, the truth of their claim. Much to their frustration, students got their responses sent back to them to fix this sentence repeatedly (again, the opportunity to revise—once, we’re not gluttons for punishment—is so important); to our pleasant surprise, however, their ability to select appropriate evidence and weave it appropriately into their own writing improved dramatically (when they actually made those revisions, that is).

Context Sentence

In the TEPAC model, the sentence that immediately follows the piece of evidence is meant to be paraphrase; however, not all quotations (in fact, most quotations) don’t require paraphrase. Paraphrasing sentences the vast majority of readers already understand leads to unsophisticated, repetitive writing. When students are simply directed to provide two commentary sentences, they often assume the reader is following their train of thought and leave key details unsaid. We began requiring students to follow each quotation with context, prompting them to “Make it clear for your reader what this quotation is referring to; what are the circumstances surrounding the quotation you have provided? What has happened just before (or what happens just after) this quotation that your reader needs to know about in order to understand why the quotation is relevant to your claim sentence?”

Students who grasped what we were going for here, because it does take some practice, began to write much more thorough, smooth paragraphs (especially when writing about literature) that helped the reader follow their train of thought and helped them, as writers, to move away from commentary sentences that were mere summary.

Commentary Sentence

By the time students got to their commentary sentence (sometimes referred to as “analysis”), they had clearly explained their piece of evidence, and now they were ready to explain how their selected quotation supported the claim sentence. The farther we got into the school year, the more we encouraged students to explain how specific words or phrases in their quotation supported their claim, rather than just the general idea. Students found it easier to write more meaningful commentary sentences when they provided a quotation that showed their claim (rather than merely repeated it), and as a result, the quality of their analysis went up.

For more advanced students (or if we were using a paragraph as a formal writing assignment rather than a full essay), we asked students to provide a transition sentence after this sentence and then repeat the concrete evidence, context, commentary sentences chain as needed to fully support their claim sentence.

Connection Sentence

We stopped asking students to write a concluding sentence after years of reading sentences that merely repeated information that had just been stated. We might not have great memories, but we can retain the thoughts of one paragraph. Instead, we encouraged students to close a paragraph by extending the ideas they had just discussed, perhaps by stating their significance to the rest of the story or to their reader.

For example, at the end of a paragraph about Louie Zamperini’s character traits in the opening scene of Unbroken, we asked students to explain how that particular character trait might be useful in the situation he found himself in. When these paragraphs were the body paragraphs of an essay, we encouraged students to use this sentence to transition to the next point in their argument. As students began to internalize this concept, their paragraphs became more interesting and meaningful and less repetitive.

If you’re interested in trying out our 5C model for yourself, check out this resource. It includes an editable writing task (a character analysis prompt that will work for a wide variety of texts), which provides prompts that walk students through each sentence in the model; a list of adjectives that can be used to describe character; a scoring guide adapted to specifically fit the model; and a lesson overview that includes relevant content standards.

How do you teach writing in your classroom? Do you like to focus on the paragraph or are your students ready to tackle the essay as a whole? What strategies to teach writing have you found most successful? Let us know at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works. And if you use our resource, be sure to let us know how it goes!