Putting It All Together: Point Evidence Analysis and Development
A step-by-step guide to putting each part of a PEAD paragraph together.
What is this Guide for?
This guide is to help people who aren’t sure what to write about in the development part of PEAD paragraphs when answering exam questions for GCSE and A-Level. It’s highly recommended you use the PEAD method to organise your argument. PEAD stands for Point, Evidence, Analysis, and Development, and using this structure makes it much more likely that you will talk about all the things you need to for those high-level scores.
Note: Other teachers and organisations use different acronyms to describe PEAD, you might see PEAL, PEA, PEEL, or something similar. They all mean the same thing.
Our Example: Remains by Simon Armitage
To give examples of what I am talking about, I will be using an extract from the Simon Armitage poem “Remains”. The BBC have a helpful AQA revision guide with a full audio reading if you want to see more of the poem.
Remembering All the Acronyms
To help you remember all the acronyms for writing great PEAD paragraphs, I’ve created this beautiful picture. I want you to imagine that you are standing by a road and you see an ATM ahead of you on the road driving a car. Then I want you to imagine how big your halo is when you absolutely do not think about how much money you could get if that car crashed.
ATM
AHEAD
IN CAR
HALO
Our Final PEAD Paragraph
Here is our complete example development section, but remember that before this there would be sections on your point, evidence, and analysis:
“…Armitage likely combined the pairing of rest and attack with the first person account of a soldier’s traumatic war-time experiences to place the public in his position, as it was written for the PTSD awareness TV Documentary “The Not Dead” in 2007. This would help the public feel more empathy for the soldier at a time when mental illness and treatment were heavily stigmatised.”
All that is left to do now is to add all our sections together and make it as concise as we can.
Need More Help with PEAD?
If you need any support for your Point, Evidence, Analysis, or Development paragraphs that you can’t find here, there are other resources below that might help you:
PEAD: Evidence Section - a step-by-step guide to choosing and giving good quotes in context.
PEAD: Analysis Section - a step-by-step guide to analysing quotes.
PEAD: Putting it All Together