Why Your Five-Paragraph Essay Was Great Training for Business Writing
Use your five-paragraph essay techniques to craft business articles people want to read.
Were you a victim of the five-paragraph essay in school? Were you forced to brainstorm topics to “compare and contrast,” “pro and con,” or “argue and counter argue” while you whispered rebellion in peer editing sessions. Did you assume these essays were useless, pointless, and a waste of your time? You may have even said, “No one writes this way in the real world.”
Turns out, they do — and you should too, if you want people to read your business articles.
Everything you need to know for business writing, you learned in the five-paragraph essay. Even though some people have called for the end to the five-paragraph essay, all the techniques you learned in school — from the title to the takeaway — are critical to get people to click and read your articles.
While you don’t need to write “five” total paragraphs, you do need to use techniques you learned for the article length, title, hook, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph support, and conclusion. Here’s why.
Article length
In the five-paragraph essay, it’s all killer, no filler. You remember “filler?” It’s the BS you filled up roughly 80 percent of all your long research papers with. But in five-paragraph essays, your BS had no place to hide.
There’s no place for BS in business articles either. The good ones keep the writing tight and get right to point (or many points, even using bullet points). In a busy business world, no one has time for your BS.
Great titles
Like your teacher said, a good title is like a great flirt: it piques your reader’s interest without giving away the whole story. It neither over-promises (“You’ll never guess what happens next!”) or bores you (“Ceiling fans are okay.”). Remember how the best titles in school actually made you want to read a five-paragraph essay?
In business writing, catchy titles are essential to attract views and clicks. According to Moz, only two out of ten readers even make it past your headline and internet traffic can vary 500% based on your title alone!
On the internet, all your potential reader sees is a short title and a thumbnail image to decide if they should give your thoughts a twirl. Numbers and superlatives work great in Internet titles.
Essential hooks
Hooks are essential for your audience. You need to get the reader’s attention with the very first line if you want someone to read more and not click away to something more entertaining, say like a Failure Compilation on YouTube.
In business writing, you attract a reader’s attention with the same techniques you were taught in school: ask a question, use a quote, make a bold claim, or throw out a startling statistic.
The introduction: Or why are we here?
In the five-paragraph essay, the introduction was the key to showing how your content was relevant to your audience. If your intro didn’t answer the “So what?” or “Why should I care?” questions you raised with your catchy title and awesome first line, then your teacher sighed and lowered your grade.
In business writing, the best intros give enough context for your reader to understand why the rest of the article is relevant to them, while giving them the potential takeaways they will be rewarded with if they only read one paragraph more.
Keeping it topical
Your reader always needs to know the controlling idea of every paragraph. The best ones give the topic and make a general claim of what will follow. You did them in school because you had to, but in business you need to.
Topic sentences are essential because business readers love to skim. If you don’t have a clear topic for each paragraph, you will have a frustrated reader who leaves your website to find better written articles.
Paragraph support
You always need to develop your ideas. Your writing teacher taught you to make a claim, explain your claim, and support your claim with good examples (and citations). If you didn’t, you saw red ink and weak grades.
In business writing, you also need bold claims (or takeaways) and strong examples to back them up (and use links to real authors and not just websites). The links help build authority not only for your article but also for your webpage so more people will read and find your writing on the web in the future.
Conclusions
A great five-paragraph essay ends with a bang. In school, your teacher told you to make a “call for action” or end with some final ironic twist.
In business writing, you also want to have a final takeaway for your reader. The best ones, like Steve Jobs keynotes, give you one more thing.
When not rocking it out with his band Duh Professors, Kyle Crocco can be found as a Marketing Coordinator for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and a Content Marketer for Airtime Watertime®.
