The Dreaded 3.8 Paragraph

One thing that Mrs.Inflatable Toys house Abrams knew how to teach, was writing. She could see the problems you have in your writing and had a solution to each. A factor that helped her be able to identify with the writing of her students was that she had a deep understanding of each and every one of them. Mrs. Abrams knew how each student liked to write and what their tendencies were. If a student were prone to writing overdone, run on, off topic sentences, Mrs. Abrams would be the first one to tell that student. This ability to spot problems in writing wasn't something that she just had; it came from her knowledge of the personalities of each one of her students. She made the class feel as though they were the only students in the class. It felt like she put all her attention on you and you alone.
Before comingsintosthe 8th grade, writing was not something that I did. Writing was one of those far away art forms that you would admire, but never did yourself. The closest comparison would have to be ice sculpting. The end result of an ice sculpture looks pretty cool, but you could never picture yourself doing it. That was how I felt about writing. I would do it when I had to, but I realized that I really didn't like it. That's not to say that I wasn't any good at it. In years past, I noticed one thing. Whenever we did write, I would read the things that other students were writing and my writing would be light years ahead of what they were doing. It would feel like reading a Doctor Seuss book whenever we read each other's papers (Doctor Seuss is the multi-award winning writer who wrote the books, "The Cat in the Hat" and "Green Eggs and Ham". All of his books are directed towards very young kids who are starting to read or whose parents read to them. Almost every kid who grew up in America has read a Doctor Seuss book.) Despite this, I still felt that I really didn't like to write and there was no future in it. It's kind of ironic seeing how I'm writing a book right now, but believe me, three years ago, this was the last thing I wanted to do.
The second day in Mrs. Abrams' class, we were introduced to something I had heard of many times before, the 3.8 paragraph. This is the model of writing that all the elementary and junior high teachers wanted you to follow. It shows you how to write about a topic using 3 main ideas in 8 paragraphs, hence 3.8 paragraph. The paragraph was comprised of one paragraph for the introduction, one for the conclusion, and two for each main idea. We had seen this for the last 3 years. By now, it was old news. The teachers before Mrs. Abrams all wanted us to write out papers in this form, but they never enforced it. I easily passed by writing a beautifully descriptive, thoughtful, and articulate paper without even following the 3.8 format and still get a one hundred percent. 3.8 paragraphs were the bane of my writing techniques.
I got a little surprise when I tried this same stunt in Mrs. Abrams' class. For about the entire first quarter of the year, I had trouble with the writing assignments in her class. I would pump out some papers that I thought were the best I had ever written and wind up with 85's on them. I had no idea why. It didn't matter what the topic was, I would write a paper, which I thought, was absolutely top notch and get it back with a big B on it. What made me even more frustrated was that others were getting A's consistently. Why? I read their papers, but their ideas and their language were horribly childish. The words and way they wrote astounded me, it was really like reading a third grade paper. Yet, they got better grades than I did!? I was absolutely confused by why my papers couldn't make the cut.