In Brief:

• A single-paragraph approach to improving school writing performance might sound like a good idea, but it's holding students back from their potential.
• Unless you teach a variety of paragraph structures that allow the writer to reveal a deeper range of cognitions, students will consistently underperform in written activities.  
• Educational AI pioneer and best-selling author Dr Ian Hunter examines what we know about paragraph writing and suggests four ways to improve school writing results using a progressive, multi-paragraph structure approach. 

Teaching paragraphing is part of every global curriculum system.  Typically, students are introduced to paragraphing in their third or fourth year of education and then develop this skill further as they advance.  However, in the 1980s, concerned with growing numbers of students who couldn’t write well, many schools adopted a ‘one paragraph structure’ approach.  The logic appeared sound.  If students were unable to write clear paragraphs, the solution was to adopt a single paragraph model for the whole school so everyone could learn ‘the same paragraph’.

Popular was the PEEL form.  The acronym stands for Point, Explanation, Example, Link.  These four components spoke to the structure of the paragraph.  The student would commence with the point, move to the explanation of this point.  Offer evidence to support the point.  And then conclude the paragraph with a linking sentence. 

Spread in Popularity

Soon, PEEL was followed by other forms.  Educators began using structures like PEAL, SEAL, SEED, TEAL, TEEL, while more adventurous proponents developed their own killer variants: TEXAS (with no relationship to chainsaws) and PETAL to name just two.

And on we went.  Yet, at the same time, an annoying undercurrent kept surfacing in high school performance that refused to be abated.  Even with their newfound paragraphing skills, students were underperforming in written examinations.  And oddly, even academically gifted students were underperforming. 

We need to give our students the tools. And if we don't, our students will underperform.

It seemed, not to put too fine a point on it, that while paragraph structures like PEEL might guarantee your students a pass, these structures struggled to deliver high levels of writing excellence.  Or at worse, if academically gifted students adopted these paragraph forms, they would underperform in external examinations.  The A+ student got an A-.  And the question is: why?

To answer this conundrum, we must first take a historical sidestep and ask ourselves two important questions: where did PEEL come from, and how was paragraphing taught in the past?  Because PEEL wasn’t how paragraphing was always taught. 

Background to PEEL

PEEL was a solution to a problem.  But ironically, it wasn’t a writing problem: it was a reading problem.  PEEL appears to have been initially developed by remedial reading teachers as a means of explaining paragraph structures to students who found comprehension difficult.  The simplified components were an aid to understanding.  

Sadly—a bit like a virus jumping species—PEEL leapt its way out of reading recovery programmes and burrowed its way into English classrooms, only to spread rapidly among hard-pressed English teachers in search of a solution for their writing dilemmas. 

During the 1990s, and partly in pursuit of a paragraph structure that might deliver greater amounts of analytical insight, other variants, such as SEED, TEXAS, TEEPEE, arose.  Yet, the writing dilemma persisted.  Worse still, leading writing researchers, such as Steve Graham in the United States observed there was now a clear ‘hole’ by the middle years of high school in student writing performance.  Graham notes that unless we teach increasingly sophisticated writing forms (as we demand increasingly deeper cognitions from our students) a gap emerges.  

Of course, Graham is right.  We do have a hole in high school writing capability.  But before we arrive at a possible solution, we first need to think about the goal.  What is it that writing actually does? 

"Unless we teach increasingly sophisticated writing forms (as we demand increasingly deeper cognitions from our students) a gap emerges."

Writing Reveals Thinking

Think what writing does.  Writing performs many functions—it’s a means for communication, reflection, the expression of thoughts, the promulgation of ideas, the advancement of science and religion and intellect.  In all of these, what is the common denominator?  Writing reveals thinking.  We show on a page the thoughts held and shaped in our minds.

Yet, not all thinking is the same.  And how we want others to understand our thoughts differs.  Sometimes, we want to immediately show someone an answer and then prove it with evidence.  That’s deductive thinking.  But not all thinking is deductive.  Sometimes we want to do the complete opposite of deductive thought.  We want to use suspense and have our reader arrive at the pivotal moment.  This is inductive thinking.  Sometimes we want to distil insights based on the relationship between two or more variables: that’s synthetic thought.  Sometimes, we want to show extrapolation, or inference, or posit and deal with counterfactuals, or demonstrate critical analysis.  Each of these cognitions—and our education systems demands all of them—requires writing to be structured differently.  How you order your thoughts, how you deal with evidence, when you reveal certain things, when you conceal others: the insights and perceptions you unveil.  In short, if you want to show different thinking, you need different types of paragraph structures.

Teachers before us have done just that.  Go back 100 years and you will find teachers in classrooms around the globe teaching multiple forms of the paragraph to their students, in order for those students to deliver the best ‘thinking’ and writing on the page.  It’s time to recover what was lost.  For teaching one paragraph structure to a school and believing all will be well with our students is a bit like teaching a player one tennis shot and hoping they win the US Open.  It ain’t going to go well.  We need to give our students the tools.  And if we don’t, our students will underperform.

Fixing the Problem

I’ve endeavoured to close this paragraphing gap in my writing system.  To assemble a range of paragraph structures that are a) easily learnt and taught, and b) enable students to deliver a range of cognitions on the page.

There are ten paragraph structures in total (including introduction and conclusion paragraphs).  And the paragraph structures move from deductive thought, to synthetic thinking, to inductive thinking, to critical analysis.  This way, when the student requires more sophisticated paragraph structures to convey more sophisticated thinking processes, they have them.  And a potential educational hole is avoided.  The mainstream student is more enabled, and the highly-capable student no longer underperforms in examinations due to not having a range of paragraph tools at their disposal.

More sophisticated paragraph structures enable students to convey more sophisticated thinking processes.

At Writer’s Toolbox, we have developed a full scope and sequence: every writing skill—every paragraph structure—that should be taught from the first year of primary school to the final year of high school.  And we have found writing performance has increased in schools using this approach.  Students are making strategic decisions about how to say what they are thinking in paragraph form.  Students report increased confidence, increased agency, and stronger results in examinations.  There isn’t room in this article to discuss my full scope and sequence.  Nevertheless, let me give you some key take outs to help: 

1. Do not use a single paragraph structure as a solution to a school writing problem.  It will cause your students to underperform.
2. Adopt a progressive paragraphing model that teaches a range of paragraph structures as the student advances.  The best order I suggest: commence with deductive, then teach synthetic, then inductive, then critical analysis structures.
3. Remember: in writing, structure follows purpose.  You first decide what it is you want to say (your purpose) then you choose the best paragraph structure that supports that.  It’s never the other way round.  Don’t arbitrarily give students a single paragraph structure thinking it will solve all types of expression.  It doesn’t.
4. It starts with your teachers first.  In one recent NSW study of teacher capability to teach writing, 60 per cent of teachers reported they felt unprepared to teach writing in their classrooms.  We need to support our teachers.  If you are going to start a journey to better writing in your school, it starts with building your teacher capability. 

And the good news: a very different outcome for our students is only months away.