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Intro To5 Paragraph Media Criticism

An Introduction to Five Paragraph Media Criticism

Davis Foulger, Brooklyn College

July 16, 2007

The five paragraph is a highly structured essay form that packages three distinct arguments between an introduction and conclusion. Many readers of this text will have already written five paragraph essays at some point in High School and/or college. It is often used to teach students how to write better. The author encountered the form for the first time in junior high school, when a friend of my grandmother, in a family effort to enhance my reading and writing skills, introduced me to the book "The Practical Stylist" by Sheridan Baker.

The nice thing about the five paragraph essay form, at least for this book, is that it keeps the writers focused on finding and supporting a small set of arguments. In doing so, it keeps the writers focus on thinking about those arguments rather than creating a large amount of text. Indeed, one of the most interesting things you will discover as you consider the methods outlined in this text are the different kinds of arguments associated with the different methods.

Semiotic arguments focus on "signs" and the meanings that we associate with them. Narrative arguments focus on the different ways in which a story connects beginnings to ends. Reader-Response arguments focus on your reactions to a message. Ethnographic arguments focus on other peoples reactions. Reception theory arguments examine the ways in which content is shaped to engage audiences. The arguments associated wtih Auteur theory examine the vision that directors and other content producers bring to their message making. The arguments associated with genre theory expose patterns that recur across content of a particular type, and explore the reasons for those patterns. Ideological arguments explore the ways in which messages express and reinforce power relations within a culture.

This is not to say that there isn't overlap between the methods. Semiotic and narrative arguments are particularly likely to recur in other modes of analysis. It remains, however, that the differences between the methods outlined in this book extends to the nature of the thesis that is explored and the form of the arguments that are made in support of that thesis. Our goal, in this text, is to help you to understand each method well enough that you can use it. We will use the five paragraph essay to structure your initial use of each method such that you will create good arguments in support of a reasonably good thesis.

Each of the five paragraphs of a five paragraph essay has a specific purpose:

1. The first paragraph provides a general introduction to the subject matter of the essay that leads to a thesis. Baker describes it as a funnel that starts with a general statement about the subject matter of the essay and then leads to authors specific purpose in writing the essay. This purpose, the thesis, can, for the purposes of this book, be usefully thought of as a single specific research question or hypothesis that you intend to answer in the essay.
2. The second paragraph explores a single argument that supports the thesis. An argument, for the purposes of this book, can be thought of as an observation or a piece of evidence that you have observed in consuming some portion of your body of content.
3. The third paragraph explores a second argument (e.g. observation or piece of evidence. This is usually a good place to put an observation that contrasts the first argument in an interesting way.
4. The fourth paragraph explores a third argument (e.g. observation or piece of evidence. I generally recommend that you save your strongest evidence for this argument.
5. The fifth paragraph starts by restating the thesis, proceeds to review the evidence that you have developed in support of it, and generally ends with a discussion of what you would want to explore if you used the method in more detail.

The resulting essay is somewhat artificial and provides very little opportunity to explore individual arguments in detail. Fully developed articles in these critical traditions will generally be much longer, with authors usually using a wider variety of arguments and exploring each in considerably greater detail than a single paragraph will allow. But the point here is to understand the general process of doing media criticism using a variety of methods. However artificial these essay may be, they should impart the fundamentals of each method. It should not be difficult, based on this knowledge and your reading of the work of others, to expand from five paragraphs to a fully developed critical essay.