Whether you are a PEE, PEEL, PETAL or PETER devotee, or resolutely refuse to reduce students' analytical writing to a set of rules, there's no doubt that English students need ongoing support with paragraph writing to develop their writing skills.
Here are some of our favourite paragraph writing resources which cover the fundamentals of effective paragraph writing to help English students with their academic writing and analytical skills.
Understanding paragraphing acronyms: the building blocks
If you've tried the PEE, PEA and PEEL formula (Point, Evidence, Explanation or Analysis or Link), The PEE chain is a handy, visual metaphor, reminding students how this framework can be used for literary analysis, while PEE mobile offers a supersized approach to developing students' confidence in how to write the perfect paragraph, with teaching ideas and a display template. Both can help students to write single sentences analytically to convey a central idea or main point, which can help them in turn to write short, effective paragraphs more confidently.
Many academies and MATs have moved from PEE to PETER (Point, Evidence, Technique, Explanation, Reader response or Reflection). This needs to be introduced and modelled carefully to avoid laboured, overly explained or pedestrian analysis from students.
Analysing and writing about a fiction text: word mat provides an alternative building block acronym to PETER for students to try: EARS (Evidence, Analysis, Reader response, Speculation). With sentence starters and analytical vocabulary to encourage students to use different words to express their ideas, this resource is useful for students to refer to in any English literature lesson.
Peer and self-assessment: improving students' academic writing
If you want to encourage more reflection and discussion about the process of writing paragraphs, Writing peer assessment provides helpful prompts to walk younger students through the process of providing feedback to peers. Evaluating a PEE paragraph works in a similar way for KS4-5 English students who are (hopefully) more practised in the art of paragraph writing and paragraph structure, and covers details like transition words, linking words, commas, capital letters and full stops. It could be adapted to work with any paragraph acronym you use.
Structuring paragraphs and ideas
For a bite-sized approach to persuasive paragraph writing in a variety of forms, try First and last paragraphs – what comes in between?. Students experiment by writing a group of sentences for new paragraphs in a range of persuasive articles, letters and speeches – great for exam practice and to develop their paragraph writing skills in a fun way. For fiction or descriptive writing practice, try the Creative writing version of the same resource, which is ideal for reluctant writers.
If you are looking for a guide to perfect topic sentences or first sentences, Tip Top paragraphing is one of Teachit's most popular paragraphing resources. This helpful poster on paragraph writing for students explains when to start a new paragraph or your next paragraph and topic sentence, using the acronym TiP TOP: ti for time change, p for place change, to is for a topic change and p is for a change of person.
This article was first published as an Editor's pick newsletter in December 2021.
