Day Six: Organizing Your Body Paragraphs: the PIE-C Technique

During our last class, we talked about the elements of a good thesis statement and the vitally important role that thesis statements play in organizing your essay. A good thesis statement will clearly state the author's purpose/goal/reason for writing as well as offer a preview of the supporting arguments that he or she will use to support his/her argument. Today we will be talking about how to logically organize the body paragraphs in an essay so that they easy to read, convincing and connect back to the main purpose as stated in the thesis. The outline for today's class can be found below: 

Effective Body Paragraph Structure: PIE-C

I. Brainstorming: How do you normally organize the information in the body paragraphs in your EAP essays? Is it important to organize this information? What comes first? What comes last? How about in the middle of the paragraph? 

II. Using PIE-C to Structure Your Body Paragraphs

Today we'll be talking about an easy-to-use and very effective way to logically structure the body paragraphs for your EAP essays. It's called the "PIE-C" or "PIE" technique. No, we will not be eating any desserts in class. "PIE-C" is an acronym that stands for: 

P: Point

I: Illustration

E: Explanation

C: Concluding Sentence 

To better explain this concept, let's talk a look at this PowerPoint presentation. Please follow along using this handout. At the end, we'll do a little practice to help improve to identify each of the four major PIE-C computers in a couple of example paragraphs. 

III. In-Class Work Time

For the last part of class, you will have some time to start working on the fourth Diagnostic Analysis Paragraph (see instructions below) and/or the assigned "Writer's Help" activities. 

Housekeeping Details and Homework for Tuesday (9/17/2013)

-I linked you all to the section in "Writer's Help" on "Parallelism". I'd like each of you to read through the introductory information on maintaining parallel structure in your essays. Then, everyone one should do the first activity at the bottom of the page entitled, "Exercise: Identifying Parallel Structure" as well as one of the following three exercises: Parallelism 1, Parallelism 2 or Parallelism 3. You may do all if you like, but it's only necessary to do one. 

-Diagnostic Analysis Paragraph #4: Write a short paragraph (no more than 300 words) that answers the following question: Identify the PIE-C structure for your first body paragraph from the first draft of your diagnostic essay. Highlight each component in a different color just like we did in class. After doing so, answer these questions: for each paragraph, did you follow the PIE-C structure? If so, where did you learn to do so? If not, what is missing? Identify one or two things you did well (with respect to PIE-C) and one or two things you could improve. Then create a plan to revise your body paragraphs for your final draft.