As a 40 year English teacher, I continue to read arguments from those who admonish the five-paragraph essay. As a form, they claim, it is archaic, restrictive, harmful, even evil. Student writers deserve more, they say: the freedom to let their ideas grow “organically” and spontaneously, to move into uniquely “personal” shapes.

To them I say, phooey.

Early, I learned the sanctuary of form from my father who saw its inherent value as a means of focusing the most undisciplined thoughts, of holding them steadily, and then drawing out the finest insights. In his composition handbook, The Shape a Writer Can Contain, he lays out the shapes that have—for me and countless students—given rise to our best thinking and writing.

Paradoxically, these shapes do not restrict but rather provide invaluable boundaries that make us look deeply. They ask us to dig rather than skim, to hone rather than plunder.

Consider the Olympic gymnast as she approaches the floor exercise. Within the boundaries of a regulation-sized mat, she works her magic. Though many will take the mat and perform within the same boundaries at the U.S. Women’s Gymnastic Trials, there is only one Aly Raisman whose choreography, athleticism, and execution are, this day, perfect. The regulation-sized mat and prescribed time limits have not, in any sense of the word, restricted Ms. Raisman. In truth, they have freed her to express herself in ways that defy what the human body can do.

Or consider the sonneteer who unleashes his words and thoughts into 14 finely shaped lines. Faced with the shape of a sonnet, I doubt that William Shakespeare whined about its restrictive nature. I imagine that he looked within this shape and, delighted with the possibilities in its depths, began:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?                                                                       Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

And then I imagine that 12 lines later, surprised at where this shape had taken him, he leaned away from his desk to read the draft that became Sonnet 18, a sonnet whose words endure and express love as aptly and as gloriously as any poet ever has.

For me, the essay has been such a shape. I have watched thousands of students in three different states take sanctuary in this shape with the same sense of possibilities, a valuable means to an even more valuable end. I have cheered when mediocre thinkers and writers have given themselves to this form and, drafts later, emerged as better thinkers, better writers, and better individuals. Sitting on my sofa, red pen in hand, I have graded years of student essays, discovering works that I can honestly admit I would have given my left arm to have written.

My days, however, are perhaps the finest forms. They offer 24 hours of possibilities. And best yet, with each day, there are mercies and options anew. If the previous day’s creative work is not finished, I can begin again; if I see new paths and projects, I can pursue them. There is something hallowed about the sanctuary of a day. Formed with the same number of hours—always the same number of hours—the day does not bind us into tedium or mediocrity. Unless we let it. Unless we desire it.

In T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” he writes of one man who chooses not to see the redemptive value of form:

 For I have known them all already, known them all:                                                        Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,                                                    I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;                                                                  I know the voices dying with a dying fall                                                                  Beneath the music from a farther room.                                                                                                    So how should I presume? 

Clearly, Prufrock should not presume. Measuring “out one’s life with coffee spoons” is refusing to see what a day offers. Claiming to have “known them all already” is refusing to live. Prufrock is a man who would stand with those who rail against the five-paragraph essay. Let him.

As for me and my house, we choose to mine the prospects of the most marvelous shapes. We choose to take sanctuary in form.