Fispeven analysis

Fispeven Analysis, previously and occasionally called the Penta Technique, is a revision strategy often used in composition classes. Most Etymologists trace its nomenclature to a 17th century University of Paris professor, Augustine Hay. Also notable for writing Scotia Sacra, an ode to his home country, Hay conceived Fispeven Analysis while mentoring young monks at the Abbey of St. Genevieve. Frustrated with their monotonous prose, Hay dissected their writing with a simple table, which originally had only four columns: sentence number, first four words of the sentence, special features (such as personification or anaphora), and verbs. However, he added a fifth and final column, "number of words per sentence," a few years later to assist students whose writing lacked variation in sentence length.
During the French Revolution, the National Assembly evicted members of the monastery and, in 1800, Napoleon assented to its destruction; soldiers demolished all but the Abbey's bell tower. Sadly, most of Hay's works were lost in this political pandemonium. Yet nearly three centuries later, a few Americans recovered precious manuscripts while studying in Paris. Among them was an unexceptional author of the lost generation, Robert Calhoun. Though his literary endeavors won him little notoriety, Calhoun's immense contribution to Fispeven Analysis has forever endured. Noticing the interesting style of composition revision, he passed off the manuscripts to a far more capable peer, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald--F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was not as fully enamored with this style, which he immediately condemned as "an futile effort to box the breadth of prose, and quantify that which cannot even be qualified." Despite this original incredulity, Fitzgerald progressively came to see the Penta Technique as an effective method to summarize the mechanics of one's prose. However, a staunch idealist, he refused to use solid lines in his tables, opting instead for dotted lines to divide his columns.
Recognizing its strengths, Fitzgerald shared Penta Technique at one of his extravagant dinner parties (for which he is well-noted) with fellow American writers in France. They likewise saw its utility. In fact, a few of his peers even diagramed their own writing with Penta Technique and, respecting contribution, began to call it Fitz's Evening Analysis. This was a rather arduous title to pronounce, especially for those French speakers with whom Fitzgerald often discoursed on literature. Thus, they eventually abridged Fitz's Evening Analysis to Fitzseven Analysis and, finally, to Fispeven Analysis.
Such authors inevitably imported Fispeven Analysis back to the United States where, following the Second World War, it began to take hold in university classrooms. Since, it has further proliferated, and Fispeven Analysis now pervades in freshman to graduate classes, in high school to professional writing.

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