Hi everyone, I’m Ms Atifa, an English teacher at Lil’ but Mighty. Have you ever felt unsure about how to write your examples in your expository essays? Whether it is an argumentative or discursive essay, examples are a key part of each body paragraph.

Before we dive into how to elaborate on your examples, let’s first look at how the body paragraphs of an expository essay should be organised. As you might know, it’s important for us to use the PEEL (Point, Explanation, Example, Link) structure when crafting the body paragraphs. Sometimes, a common error made by students is that they write only one sentence for each part of PEEL. However, this is insufficient to develop your content for each body paragraph. We should always ensure that each part of PEEL is elaborated on meaningfully.

Particularly, students may forget this when it comes to the Example in PEEL. When writing an example, we should make it a point to avoid listing the example in one sentence. Listing refers to just writing down an example without explaining it in relation to your main point, or listing many different examples without elaboration. To avoid this, remember these three important words: Explain your example! Although the PEEL structure is helpful for your expository essays, you can also take note of the following extension of PEEL to remind yourself to explain your examples:

To better understand how to explain your examples, let’s analyse two listed examples below. Our analysis is based on the following question:

First of all, take note that the ‘Do you agree?’ portion of the question identifies it as an argumentative essay, which requires you to take a stand and justify that stand. For the purpose of this analysis, let’s agree with the statement. Also, since we are focusing on how to elaborate on examples, I have provided only these 2 parts of PEEL: Point and Example. As such, each point below states an advantage of playing team sports, accompanied by its corresponding example, and is by no means a complete body paragraph:

As you can clearly tell, the examples above require more development because they do not strengthen their respective main points. Example 1 only lists the example without any explanation of how exercise can lead to a state of short-term relaxation. It is also better to give one example and elaborate on it well, instead of listing multiple examples like in Example 2.

So what can we do instead of simply listing an example (or multiple examples)? We should follow up the example with at least one thorough explanation. The explanation should also address the following essential question:

What does this example show that strengthens my main point?

Now, let’s see two reworked examples that improve on the listed examples we saw above. For each reworked example, I have added an explanation (in bold) that addresses how the example strengthens the main point. For Example 2, I have also amended the example to focus on one specific team sports (soccer), instead of listing multiples ones:

Both of these examples are better than the ones we saw previously as they both give a thorough explanation of the main points, and show how the examples support the main points.

To practise explaining your examples, let’s try to come up with a developed example for a point based on the essay question below:

(Taken from O Level 2020 Paper 1 Section C)

Before working on the example, let’s take a closer look at what type of expository question this is. This is a discursive question, and I know this because it asks “What is your opinion?”, which does not explicitly require you to take a stand. Instead, you should offer a balanced discussion, i.e. you should provide two points to support and two that oppose the given topic. For the purpose of the practice, the point given below is the first main point, i.e. it supports the topic:

Remember to explain the example by considering the question, “What does this example show that strengthens my main point?” Let’s say that this is the example that you have come up with:

To elaborate on the example, you will need to show how this relates to the main point you are trying to make, i.e. being receptive prevents students from repeating the same mistakes. See the complete model example below, with its explanation in bold:

I hope that you try this practice in your own time. Do remember to explain your examples thoroughly if you work on an expository essay so that your content would be more developed. Do share with us in the comments section if you have other tried and tested ways for elaborating your examples. Bye for now!