> English classes in the U.S. spend a lot of time teaching people how to write five-paragraph essays: one paragraph of introduction, three paragraphs of argumen

> English classes in the U.S. spend a lot of time teaching people how to write five-paragraph essays: one paragraph of introduction, three paragraphs of argument, one paragraph of conclusion. But outside the classroom the five-paragraph essay form is worse than useless: it's actively harmful. What also does not help is imposing limits (generally minimum pages) on students, so they feel they need to pad their papers with worthless content. Things like that become habits in normal writing after some amount of time. I did have some technical writing courses at my university that at least tried to emphasize saying what you mean as clear as possible without a lot of fluff, but only engineers and computer scientists were require to take them as far as I know.