Throughout history, people have been writing essays. That start like this. Yeah. Writing is tough stuff. We all remember Mrs. Calorafi in the third grade, laying down the ground rules for an expository essay (which would brainwash our fragile young minds). You always want to start out with a general statement. Why? Because throughout history, essays have started out with a general statement.

And after you make your general statement, you haphazardly tie whatever it is you were assigned to write about to your general statement. You do this by saying, “In the book blah, author Blah says …” And then you follow up with a good two or three out of context quotations. The last sentence of the first paragraph is reserved for your thesis. For example, luminary thinking like “The Holocaust was bad because …”

Then you will write a couple paragraphs to back up your statement, maybe using some “primary sources.” Be sure to quote Hitler a few times. Do this until you believe you have amassed sufficient evidence to convince the reader that Hitler was indeed a bad person.

Of course, the five paragraph form demands an antithesis, or at least a nod to your opposition. So you will actually have to include a few sentences on why Hitler wasn’t really all that bad of a dude. Or you will fail. Maybe a little about how ethnic cleansing is just a misunderstood concept. If you are a skilled essay writer you will give these considerations a fair and balanced view. This is just the nature of the beast. If you write a five paragraph essay then you are, by default, a Nazi.

Luckily, no Cornell professor has ever instructed me to specifically write a five paragraph essay (not to say that most Cornell essays aren’t five paragraphs long). Nor have I ever been instructed to take “Cornell Notes” for that matter. As a side note, somebody at Cornell actually invented Cornell Notes, wherein you leave an extra wide margin on the left hand side of your notebook for questions. This revolution in note taking was someone’s PhD thesis. Dr. Cornell Notes. Anyway, I do believe that most professors are pretty tired of reading paper after paper that begins and ends the same way. Don’t blame it on us though — it’s just the way we were brought up.

You know what the problem is? Nobody writes essays for fun anymore. People used to just sit around and write five paragraphs about all sorts of random shit. Like Montaigne, the dude who invented the essay in the 16th century. He wrote about all sorts of useless crap, like ruminations on being old and being married. Nobody does that anymore. Nobody sits and says, “I am going to do some expository writing on the usefulness of bed linens.” Instead, 500 years later, we have entire departments at Cornell that break down and analyze old essays, like Montaigne’s, and write essays about his essays. Probably with titles like “Roots of Existentialism” and “Gender War During The War of The Roses.” Actually, most of this is contained in the Medieval Studies room in Olin library. For which I am quite thankful because it’s a great study space.

Research is awesome, but surely there’s a point where we take it too far. Maybe the umpteenth neo-deconstruction of Chaucer isn’t the best idea for an essay. As Wayne Gretzky put it, “I skate to where the puck is.” Maybe we already have enough. But no, the world of academia in which we reside moves on and on, with research about research disputing other research about some guy who died a long time ago.

And why? Because of the five paragraph essay. You can write about whatever the hell you want and as long as you back it up with some completely out of context quotes, you are making a point. We grew up on the idea of “supporting the thesis,” not “don’t waste paper.” Why do we have to quote someone famous? Hell, half of all the most popular quotes used in essays can be used and re-used for practically any purpose. According to Michael Jordan, “You miss 100 percent of the shots that you don’t take.” Try a three paragraph essay. Maybe one paragraph. Maybe go commando.

The worst offenders, according to Y. Feldman, are literary essays. These are the essays in which fictional characters are treated as real people with real feelings. When you have a class of students asking what the reaction of a fictional character to a fictional circumstance tells you about his fictional personality — well, I think we have a problem. I find it very difficult to participate in discussions about what childhood experiences might have made Jay Gatsby the way he is, for example. The only thing I want to do in these circumstances is stand up and shout “Books isn’t people,” like the Soylent Green guy. But I am afraid that if I question the value of this academic exercise, I will be whisked away by robed professors and made an English major.

To add credence to this article, I would like to insert a quote: “The doom of a nation can be averted only by a storm of flowing passion, but only those who are passionate themselves can arouse passion in others.” Who said that? Washington? Jefferson? Obama? It was Hitler who said it best.

Yevgeniy Feldman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at yfeldman@cornellsun.com. That Really Grinds My Gears appears alternate Mondays this semester.