Clear paragraphing is useful to get your point across to your reader, within your writing. All paragraphs should include:
As your confidence with academic writing grows you will adapt your paragraphs to your needs and the assignment you are producing but they will still contain these basic building blocks.
This structure may be familiar if you have used PEEL paragraphs before.
Look at the document below to explore more about structuring your assignments.
The POINT refers to the point the paragraph is making.
When writing, we need to be kind to the reader and guide them through our work. Therefore, we need to introduce the point of each paragraph to the reader. This is often done in the first sentence or two of the paragraph. Making this introduction means the reader knows what to expect in the rest of the paragraph and can follow your thinking.
You will need to support your points with EVIDENCE.
In order for your writing to be persuasive you will need to EXPLAIN to your reader how the evidence supports the point. This will involve analysing and evaluating the evidence.
You could answer questions like how, why, so what to help you to do this within this part of your paragraph.
Finally, you will need to LINK this paragraph to the next so your writing flows. You might also link this paragraph back to your overall assignment question or overarching argument to help the reader see how it is answering the task you have been set.
Although studies have shown that medical cannabis may have some analgesic effect, this remains controversial (POINT). Several U.S. studies have indicated that cannabinoid analgesia is equally as effective, or more effective than, opioids for pain management in patients with chronic pain (Abrams, 2018; Yanes et al., 2019). However, NICE (2019) point out that few studies examining the efficacy of medical cannabis are of high enough quality to provide conclusive evidence. In addition, medical cannabis use can result in side effects such as cognitive impairment and depression (Chou et al., 2009; Volkow et al., 2014) and long-term patients have been found to build up a tolerance to the drug and thus require ever-larger doses to achieve the same level of relief (Wakley et al., 2014) (EVIDENCE and EXPLANATION). This lack of high-quality evidence, and concerns about the safety of the drug, support the Department of Health and Social Care’s (2018) decision to place strict restrictions on the prescription of medical cannabis and suggests that physicians should therefore be careful to ensure that their patients meet all essential criteria before prescribing cannabis-based medication (LINK).