Paragraphing- It`s As Easy As Peai

One of the hardest things about writing essays can be figuring out exactly which piece of information goes where, but over the years the PEAI has served me well as a guideline.

P- The Point - What are you trying to say in this paragraph? For example "The character of Scripps serves as a narrator to the play." or "Rita`s enjoyment of Rubyfruit Jungle is indicative of her domestic unhappiness." Ideally, this should lead on from the previous paragraph with a connective. If the previous paragraph was on Hamlet`s emotional laments, the next paragraph could begin "Contrastingly, Hamlet`s indifference at Ophelia`s death indicates that self-absoprtion may be his fatal flaw."

The Point should be short and sharp, and clearly connected with the title of the essay, and should leave the examiner in no doubt as to what the paragraph will be about.

E- The Evidence - Where, in the text, is there a metaphor or line of dialogue that prove your point? It might be what the character wears, or even the stage directions during a particular scene of a play. What has made you feel that your point is the case?

Find a quote or example from the text and include it, pointing out the context surrounding it. For example "Scripps shares his name with a family of newspaper publishers, foreshadowing his later career as a journalist." This evidence links back to the first point: Scripps acts as our narrator because not only does he become a journalist (one who delivers news to the public), but this fact is echoed in his name.

The Evidence does not always need to be in quotation marks, but if it is a direct extract from the text, it will do. Quotes from poems or plays which run across more than one line may need to be indented, or include forward slashes to indicate line breaks.

A- The Analysis - How does the evidence prove the point? It might be clear as day to you- you will have spent up to two years reading this play/poem/novel over and over, but the person who is reading your essay might not have done. "Newspapers and their journalists relate factual information to the general public, a metaphor for the way in which a narrator relates the events of a play to the audience."

Remember to link back to your original point- this creates cogency, or flow, and is the defining standard of a good essay. The examiner will have read a great number of essays before they arrive at yours, so try and make it as easy as possible to read.

I - The Impact - How does a reader/the audience feel about this? "By establishing Scripps as a pseudo-narrator, the audience are made to feel comfortable when he repeatedly breaks the fourth wall." This sentence discusses the feelings experienced by the audience or reader. This part of the paragraph is the hardest to get right, as, being a reader ourself, we risk projecting our own feelings.

The audience do not feel "happy" at the marriage of Romeo and Juliet, or "mildly amused" when everybody dies at the end of Hamlet. The impact is less of an emotion, more of a vague sense- the audience, for example, understands a character better, or, in the case of tragedy, is made aware that a character is nearing their inevitable demise.

Note that when writing about a novel, we talk about "the reader", but for a play or a poem, we write "the audience". This is because both plays and poems are designed to be performed as opposed to being read alone.

I apologise for the hastily-written nature of my examples, and the fact that they came from a play that most people will struggle to identify, let alone have read. This is the only work that I had to hand. If you would like to know more about constructing PEAI paragraphs, do not hesitate to get in touch.