Perhaps you haven’t even heard the term “TEEL structure” before or you have heard, but still don’t understand it completely and don’t use it in essay writing. Anyway, after reading this article, you’ll be able to understand and to use TEEL structure to be successful in writing your paragraphs.
Before writing any paper (essay, assignment, speech, etc.), you usually start with the research part. Your search for all needed information and only after that start your work. Let’s do the same in this article, and before switching to details of TEEL Structure, get some general info about the meaning of TEEL.
Ask yourself what comes to your mind first after hearing this word.
If you hear it for the first time, you may see no connection with essay writing. But if you do your first steps in this field, start using TEEL in your work, and you will see how simple and clear the process can become.
TEEL is an acronym, which is widely used in paper writing. It can also be called as “TEEL Paragraph” or “TEEL Structure.” TEEL is a structure, which purpose is to help you to organize the information, your thoughts, and your opinions. It can also be your tool in structuring the work and receiving developed and ordered essay drafts.
So let’s explain the TEEL acronym:
T means Topic Sentence
E means Explanation
E means Evidence
L means Link
TEEL structure gives you the opportunity to provide your thoughts, ideas and prove them with the evidence. Usually, the essay consists of 3-5 paragraphs, each around five sentences long. If the topic is quite comprehensive, it can be longer. Every printed body paragraph should not exceed half a page and should include all parts of TEEL Structure:
If you want to write a perfect essay, each paragraph you write should have its own topic, which should coincide with the general topic of your work.
Also, be sure to show your own analysis of the question stated in the essay. It shouldn’t look like re-writing some stories without solving the problem. You have to show your ability to research the topic in-depth.
For better understanding TEEL Structure as a system of writing an essay, let’s explain every term more detailed:
The first sentence of the paragraph is your topic sentence. It gives an overview of the whole paragraph and shows what will be discussed in it. After reading the topic sentence, the reader should already have an idea, what this paragraph is going to deal with. We should also keep in mind that the topic sentence should coincide with the general thesis of the essay. For example, if your topic sentence is about climate change, each sentence of the paragraph should broaden this thesis with some facts or evidence.
A special argument should also be provided in each topic sentence. Why?
If you provide a factual statement in the topic sentence, it won’t leave any space for the reader’s curiosity. The statement is a fact and closed information that doesn’t need any evidence or explanations. While argument always needs some examples and evidence to support the statement.
After stating the argument, it’s time to give the explanations and to provide evidence for that. You should support your statement with serious evidence. The reader should see that your statement is correct.
When we are talking about evidence, we don’t mean that ones from legislative practice. Our “evidence” is a literary term, and it should not be tough, it can be relevant. You can also use evidence the phrases of experts in the field. But be sure not to be boring to give your supporting ideas. Cold facts can kill interest in further reading of the essay. Also, keep in mind that you should stick to the subject without giving irrelevant information.
You can ask: How to do so? Just answer the following questions before starting all your evidence.
If you can answer “Yes!” to all these questions, you are on the right way!
The next step after the topic sentence in the TEEL structure is an explanation. You should broaden your topic sentence in the next three or four sentences. Try to explain the topic to such a length where your readers can get all the argumentative information you are trying to convey.
Many students add irrelevant information while writing an explanation. And this is a big mistake. Check yourself and make sure that you are not doing the same.
If you are not sure that you can convey a good explanation, you can ask for essay writing help. The expert can not only write it for you, but they also can help you to find all the needed and useful information.
So, before writing a proper explanation, be sure to have the answers to the following questions:
When you answer these questions clearly, you’ll be able to identify your ideas and thoughts better, avoiding any confusion.
If you are not proficient in writing explanations, don’t start it at once, but make yourself ready. You should take your time and make the revision of your ideas. The mirror-facing try-out is also very useful for that. Just remember how you were making yourself ready for the interview, asking yourself, and giving the answers to the questions. And replace the questions to your topic statements.
Try to answer all your questions in front of the mirror. In the process, you should clearly realize what you say to your reader. If your speech is clear and well structured, then you are in the right way, write down your ideas. But if you understand that your answers are irrelevant to the topic, then you should work on them better, trying to improve.
When you spend more time on preparing your explanation, you would understand that it is all worth it.
At the end of your paragraph, you should write your linking sentence. Honestly saying, it’s almost the same with the topic sentence. The purpose of the linking sentence is to summarize your paragraph. You provide it only after an explanation of your argument and providing all the needed evidence. Linking sentence is used as a small conclusion at the end of each paragraph. You can use some general phrases for starting your linking sentence as: “This means that…” or any other.
Check the result of putting all these parts together
If you put all the above-stated parts together, you will get a well-structured, good-framed body paragraph.
Let’ analyze every paragraph with the help of the checklist below. If you want to be sure that your essay is perfect, don’t hesitate to answer the question from the checklist.
A checklist you should use after writing each paragraph:
Check if your topic sentence gives the main idea to the reader about the information in the paragraph.
Read your explanation once again and analyze whether it has all supportive facts and no verbosity.
Make sure the evidence supports the argument of your paragraph. Also, check how close to the topic your evidence is.
Very often, we miss checking whether our linking sentence repeats the topic statement. Don’t repeat this mistake and prove that topic and linking sentence state the same idea.
In this article, we have given general information about the TEEF structure, its meaning, and various aspects of its usage. And now, at the end of this post, let’s state all the benefits of usage TEEF Structure. Although they are already clear from the statements above, let’s repeat them:
In this article, we tried to do our best to give you detailed information about TEEF Structure.
First of all, we gave the meaning of TEEF Structure and its acronym. Then we provided the description of each part of the TEEF Structure frame. Along with that, we gave some tips and procedure on how to do your best writing paragraphs. And we ended with the benefits of using this method. We really hope that you will use this method in your writing practice.
