How would you structure a basic paragraph in a GCSE English essay?

So most people rely on the simple Point, Evidence, Explain or PEE structure when writing essays. In order to get those higher marks, however, you need to use a more sophisticated structure than that. The one I’m going to teach you very quickly is the ‘What? How? Multiple? Original? Evaluate?’ method. This will help layout systematically for your examiner exactly what you are doing in each paragraph so they can tick off each criteria in their mark scheme. (We will use the quotation below, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, as an example that we can work through together)

“Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs” (Wilde, 1).

So initially in runs similar to how PEE would. So you start my making your point and saying “what” you are going to argue. For this run through our point will be concerning “how does Wilde use nature imagery in The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

Next we are going to show ‘how’ out argument is deployed in the text by providing a quotation as evidence for our assertion.

This is where the structure becomes slightly more complicated than PEE. What we are going to do is underline or highlight the key words in the quotation to help us think through our multiple interpretations. (if you are having trouble identifying which words are key words, try looking for those that have a particular emphasis placed on them, seem poetic, or have familiar symbolic associations) Once you’ve broken down the quote into it’s key words its much easier to identify what different concepts, themes and ideas are being conveyed all through the same few lines. By exploring these different interpretations is how we achieve our ‘multiple’ interpretation criteria. It is important when writing your paragraph that you filter out your interpretations in order to save time and maximise your marks.

The first interpretation you write should be your most ‘original’, that way you immediately hit the higher bands by demonstrating complex ideas. So make sure to use your best two or three interpretations of the quote to support your argument or further your point.

The last point is what most people fail to do and thus what prevents them form reaching the highest marks, ‘Evaluation’. In this step you compare your interpretations and decide which one is the strongest, which is most likely, which one carries most weight when helping convince the reader of your point. Easy ways of doing this are by showing how similar ideas are used throughout the text, therefore providing a sustained interpretation, or by brining in Secondary critics to help you argue your point. This is a really important skill to learn as it will help a lot if you take the subject further. By quoting a critic who argues in a similar vein to you, you display to the examiner your critical engagement with the text and the various debates that surround it while simultaneously strengthening your own argument by having a renown critic corroborate it.

That is a very quick run through of how to structure a GCSE English paragraph.