Is the number rule really that bad?

After looking through some of the other blogs in the class, it seems that quite a few of my fellow writing consultants in-the-making had renounced the "rule of three" or "five-paragraph essay" concepts because they did not think that these rules gave them the flexibility and sophistication to meet the more elevated requirements of the college paper assignment. Even though I agree that it would probably take a prodigiously adroit writer to write a five-paragraph essay for a minimum twelve to fifteen page assignment, the number rule really does have its use beyond the vicissitudes of high school academia. One simply needs to expand on the numbers rather than lock themselves into the idea that an essay needs to be five paragraphs long or have just three supporting arguments to a thesis in order to be successful and comprehensible. For example, instead of having a rigidly structured layout such as the generic five-paragraph all-rounder, one could expand simply by adding subtopics, and consequently, additional supporting arguments to the main supporting evidence. If an introduction has three main supporting examples that attempt to prove the thesis, then each one of these ideas can have its own set of three supporting ideas.

Hypothetically speaking, let's say I want to write about why the Obama administration was the best in the history of the United States, I could have as my thesis three main reasons that support this argument. I can say that his social policies, international policies, and economic policies (here is that "rule of three" idea) were nothing but beneficial to the progress and development of the United States. If I spent one paragraph discussing each of these subclauses, I would have my five-paragraph essay. But if I took each one of these ideas and added three supporting ideas (eg. his social policies were excellent because they furthered educational development, improved welfare for the impoverished, and guaranteed universal health insurance - having groups of three makes the process much more logical and easy to follow), I would have a much longer essay that would provide the in-depth analysis, critical thinking, and attention to detail that most college professors want to see in their students' papers. By expanding upon these number rules, you can still write a paper that is worthy of your professor's time (and maybe even get a good grade on it). There is no need to abandon the number rule because it allows us to logically structure and organize essays so that they are easier to conceptualize and also that we are forced to look for more evidence or supporting argumentation that will only strengthen the paper.