A useful and memorable event I attended whilst wearing a ‘student hat’ was a workshop entitled The Mechanics of Good Writing which I summarised in a blog post. One of my motivations for sharing is that what was covered would also be useful for students who are writing the final Computing and IT project report. All credits are, of course, due to the workshop facilitator.
A particularly useful part of the workshop was a section about paragraphing. The facilitator introduced us to (or reminded us about) an abbreviation called PEEL. Each letter represents something to think about when crafting a paragraph: point, evidence, explain, linking sentence to next paragraph.
I recently attended an EMA preparation tutorial which also highlighted paragraphs. Rather than using PEEL, you could say that it had the abbreviation PEAE, which isn’t very readable. Another way of looking at is to call it PEAS, or even PEAR.
During the tutorial, I noted down the words: point, evidence, analysis, evaluation. The point was described as a ‘topic sentence’; what is being discussed. Evidence relates to evidence from the text that you’re looking at (bear in mind that I’m talking about English literature essays here). Analysis relates to what it is that you’re looking at. The final letter, E, relates to ‘evaluation’. This might come in to play if you’re also embedding secondary sources into your paragraph that ‘speak to’ whatever evidential quote you’re chosen.
This E can also be an S, which could mean ‘so what?’. I prefer an R, meaning response, which could be your own analysis. On balance, I think I prefer PEAR rather than PEEL, but like everything, the structure will depend on what you’re writing about.
A related resource that looks both useful and simple is the BBC Bitesize Five-point-plan for structuring extended responses.
Right, back to making notes for my final EMA. Enough of this procrastination.