Step 5 of 10
PEEL gets you a competent paragraph and no further. The GP body paragraph that scores runs a fuller cycle: claim, mechanism, layered example, evaluation, link. Here is the container every other move goes inside.
PEEL, point, evidence, explanation, link, is a fine scaffold for a younger student and a ceiling for an A-Level one. It teaches you to state a point and support it, which is precisely the competent, Band 4 thing that does not climb. It has no slot for the two moves that actually earn marks: explaining the mechanism rather than restating the point, and evaluating the claim rather than only proving it.
The GP body paragraph runs a longer cycle: claim, then mechanism, then a layered example or two, then evaluation inside the paragraph, then a link back to the thesis. Think of the paragraph as a container. Get the container clean and every later move, the concession, the framework, the in-paragraph turn, has somewhere to sit. Build it sloppily and nothing you add later will hold.
The single biggest upgrade to a paragraph is the sentence that explains how or why. 'Powerful nations dominate global affairs' is an outcome. 'Powerful nations dominate through the institutions they built after 1945, the Security Council veto, the dollar's role as the reserve currency, the voting weights at the IMF' is a mechanism, and a mechanism turns description into analysis.
The test is to look at your topic sentence and find its main verb. If it says something happens or something is good or bad, you have an outcome. Add the next sentence that says by what route it happens. That sentence is also what makes evaluation possible, because you cannot test a claim whose machinery you have not shown.
One example is an anecdote. The same point made three times is a list. Three examples from different domains showing the same mechanism is a pattern, and a pattern is persuasive in a way a list never is. The aim is not to stack proofs of one claim but to show one logic operating across unlike places.
Use examples for contrast, for exception, for change over time, or for the gap between theory and reality, not for repetition. If you are arguing that controlling information is how authoritarian states hold legitimacy, do not give three countries that censor. Show the same mechanism wearing different clothes: one state managing a rising middle class, another managing a wartime narrative, a third managing street protest. Three contexts, one logic. That is what makes the pattern, not the count.
A paragraph that does not return to the thesis leaves the marker to guess what it proved. The link sentence is where you say what this paragraph does to your position: it supports it, narrows it, or holds it under a new condition. Crucially, the link is where you keep the operative term alive. If the question asked 'how far', the link should say how far this paragraph moves the answer.
This is also where the calibration from your thesis pays off. Each paragraph defends or tests one condition you named, and the link reports the result. Do that in every paragraph and the essay reads as a single argument advancing, rather than a set of separate points sitting side by side.
Here is the same paragraph built two ways. The PEEL version states and supports a point. The full-cycle version adds the mechanism, lets one example do real work, turns on its own claim, and links back with the operative term intact. It is not much longer. It is the same material, ordered to argue rather than to assert.
Notice that evaluation lives inside this paragraph, not in a separate slot later. That is the subject of the keystone step, and the body paragraph is where you apply it. A clean container plus the in-paragraph turn is most of the distance from Band 4 to Band 5.
Same topic, same length. The weak version supports one point and stops. The strong version shows the mechanism, uses a real 2024 policy, concedes who does not benefit, and links back to the operative phrase. Verified as_of 2026-06: the Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangements took effect 1 December 2024.
Book a free trial lesson and see how we teach GP from the exam backwards, with marked practice against the band descriptors.