Introduction
Students know this well enough, that it takes a lot of effort to write an impressive essay! From the selection of topic, conducting research, making the essay outline and actually writing the essay, students have to put in hours and sometimes even days to write a great essay. On top of that, the numerous other assignments, short deadlines and academic pressure only make it that much more difficult to score good marks in your essays.
However, there is one simple trick PEEL paragraphs, which can help you enhance the quality of your essay significantly without breaking a sweat! If anything, this trick of PEEL paragraph writing will make your job of writing your essay much easier!
PEEL is an acronym form for Point, Evidence, Explanation and Link. The PEEL paragraphs structure is a way of writing, through which the effectiveness and the accuracy of the essay can be increased.
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One of the major challenges a student faces in his academic career is writing an essay in an efficient way. The essays prepared by a student reflect his preparation and research commenced regarding the topic. An essay displays the student’s ability in differentiating relevant and irrelevant information regarding a topic. Because of these attributes, an essay assignment has its own significance in grade evaluation of a student.
As you know, the main purpose of writing an essay is to enable the author to convey their thoughts and opinions on a particular topic, to the audience in a short and concise manner. It is a writing skill, which teaches students, to get their point across to the readers, in a brief and accurate way while, having the maximum impact on the readers.
The major challenge in writing an essay is to juxtapose the facts and relevant points in an impressive way. Searching and sorting out the relevant sources in order to provide evidence in the essay is also a very daunting task. Good preparation and a well-prepared plan is required to write a quality essay. The approach of PEEL paragraphs, if applied (apart from introduction and conclusion) will aid in providing better clarity to the reader. The major objective of writing an essay is to convey the ideas of the writers in a convincing way. Every component of the PEEL paragraphs approach has its own significance and thus excluding a single component will reduce the impact of the content.
The best way to draft an essay is to acquire the approach of PEEL paragraphs writing. According to this approach, a paragraph in the body of an essay should be drafted by arranging the content in order of Point, Evidence, Explanation, and Link. It implies that when you start a paragraph, you should introduce your point of view, then after support your perspective using some relevant source or evidence. After providing the evidence, you should elucidate the way the proposed evidence supports your point of view. At the end of the paragraph, a smooth transition should be provided to another point by pointing out substantial links.
Point: The starting sentence of a paragraph should be catchy and should act as a title to the paragraph in itself. By reading the first sentence of a paragraph, the reader should understand the content getting to be discussed later. Because of its nature, the first sentence of a paragraph can also be termed as a title sentence. The whole context of the paragraph should be based on the point you have introduced at the beginning of the paragraph.
While choosing a point for the paragraph, the writer should be cautious as the point should be relevant to the main theme of the essay. Failure in choosing a significant point will consequently jeopardize the interest and attention of the reader. The writer should crosscheck the relevancy of the point before procuring it in the essay since it is a vital aspect of the essay. If said inclusively, the point should be attractive and beguiling from the point of view of a reader.
Evidence: In accordance with the PEEL paragraph approach, after providing the point at the beginning of your paragraph, you should defend the proposed argument using relevant evidence and real-life cases. In this section, the facts and proofs relating to the point are listed down referring to the relevant obtains and sources. These facts may be obtained from any statistics, and research conducted, remarks of related academicians and researchers, verdicts from various experiments and examination conducted etc. The section is very challenging and daunting to the writer since he has to conduct a lot of research and has to refer relevant sources from the massive assortment of online and offline data.
If taken the case of evidence, it can be divided into several categories like testimonials, personal experience, digital experience, physical experience etc. Whichever evidence you select, it should be supporting and providing ample proof to the point you have made in the beginning. Providing relevant and strong evidence is considered a big achievement for the writer in itself since it provides an authoritative nature to the point made by the writer. Suppose the writer fails in providing strong evidence, the reader may consider the point proposed in the beginning to be a deceptive and a forged one. Providing weak evidence to the point is inferior to providing no evidence.
Explanation: After providing the valid evidence according to the PEEL paragraph approach, the writer should provide a well-defined explanation of the point. The reader is only provided with your point and backing evidence which don’t convey the total idea, hence there should be a valid justification in this section. The writer has to throw light on the reason why he has provided the aforementioned point and the way by which the supporting documents justify it. The student must be cautious while writing this section of the essay since the tutor evaluates the describing skills of the writer in this segment. There will be no relevancy in providing the point and evidence without providing the explanation justifying the existing link between them. In this segment, the student should showcase his vocabulary skills and thereby display the virtuous flow of ideas. The segment should be drafted in a very subtle and authoritative manner. The student should prudently draft this section as the inclusion of too much data and jargons will create confusion. It is very important to grab the attention of the reader throughout the content in an essay.
Link: It is a bit tricky section of the essay, and most of the students fail to draft this section efficiently. The context of this section, according to the PEEL paragraph approach pertains with two purposes which makes it very complicated. At the same time, the link section should provide an end to the content discussed in the paragraph and provide a smooth transition to the next point. It will be impressive for the evaluator if the student has provided good links between the paragraphs. To master the writing of links, the student should do a lot of practice. He may also try to prepare rough drafts before preparing the original copy.
PEEL paragraphs approach will help a student in drafting a very excellent and relevant solution. The student should conduct good research and plan the topic aforehand in order to score better marks in the assessment.
The technique of PEEL paragraphs, allows writers to structure their essay and give attention to each and every paragraph they write in it. Let us look at some of the advantages of using the PEEL paragraphs structure while writing essays:
Summary and Conclusion
The technique of PEEL paragraphs is one of the most effective and widely used writing techniques, not just in the field of essay writing, but in all forms of writing. The main motive of writing in any form or medium is to facilitate the effective and accurate transfer of information. It is why, PEEL paragraphs structure has found applications in all fields of writing, and be it academic or non-academic. Different fields and regions have identified this format of writing, in a different way, be it, PEEL Paragraphs, TEEL Structure, or sometimes even the burger method of paragraph writing. In any shape or form, the main idea remains the same, which is:
The first body paragraph of the essay need not have a linking statement, as the first body paragraph should be directly correlated to the essay topic and not directly dive in deep into the topic.
However, in the final body paragraph of the essay, the transitional statement should be substituted for a conclusive sentence, which leads the essay to its conclusion paragraph. It is because there is no need for a transitional statement in the final body paragraph, as it is followed by a conclusion for the entire essay.
PEEL paragraphs are not used in the introduction and the conclusion sections of an essay, the conclusion and the introduction vary depending upon the nature and the depth of topics explored in the essay. However, the underlying principles of PEEL paragraphs can be applied to the introduction and conclusions as well.
Hope this article helped you in understanding how to improve your essay and academic writing skills with the help of PEEL paragraphs structure.