Do you need a surefire paragraph writing strategy to help your middle and high school emerging writers become proficient writers? Would you like to give your students a paragraph writing template they can use for multiple essay types and writing occasions? If your students are struggling to support claims with textual evidence, this writing resource is for you.

There are 5 easy-to-remember parts of a paragraph in this paragraph writing strategy: 

1. Claim
2. Concrete Evidence 
3. Context
4. Commentary
5. Connection

Help your students go from paragraphs that are repetitive and ineffective to paragraphs that include meaningful claims, cited evidence, and appropriate analysis with a paragraph writing strategy that works for:

• Response to literature
• Response to informational text
• Informative/explanatory
• Argumentative/persuasive
• Short answer (using textual evidence)

Introduce your students to this easy-to-follow structure with a teacher presentation that helps ensure your students support their claims with evidence they have fully explained. No more repetitive paraphrase sentences or missed commentary. 

Do your students benefit from seeing an example of the writing process in action? Built into the teacher presentation is a PreAP/honors and standard/emerging writer exemplar paragraph using a fun song from a well-known animated film to help students better understand what’s expected in each sentence.

This editable activity with digital and print options is designed to accompany any text you are reading in class. 

Your students will get practice:

• Identifying character traits 
• Supporting interpretations with textual evidence
• Completing meaningful analysis 
• Making thoughtful connections in their analysis

The scaffolded structure guides students to write detailed, well-supported responses because they’ll know exactly what they need to do in each sentence. Once students are familiar with the structure, they’ll be more likely to apply it to multiple types of writing tasks, including body paragraphs in essays.

In this scaffolded activity, share with students exactly what you want to see in a response as you demystify the writing process and empower them as writers. 

The easy-to-use scoring guide makes evaluating responses more objective and provides students with helpful, actionable feedback. 

This is not a one and done activity. Supporting claims with textual evidence is a skill students will call on again and again. As a helpful reminder of the strategy, we’ve created bookmarks and student reference handouts you can print and share so your students can ensure they’ve addressed the 5Cs every time they write.

Ways to Use and Build On this Resource

1. Because the prompt for this activity can be used with any fiction text, provide your students lots of opportunities to practice by making it a go-to question for every story you read in class.
2. Adopt this paragraph writing strategy for all writing opportunities, allowing students to see the versatility of using this approach when tackling body paragraphs.
3. Does your school practice writing across the curriculum? Show your colleagues in the social science and science departments how to support students in their writing exercises by implementing this strategy. 

Paragraph Writing Template - Parts of a Paragraph - Middle & High School English:

1. How to Write a Paragraph teacher presentation (standard/emerging writer and PreAP/honors versions; not editable, but we have included additional blank slide templates for personalization of the presentation)
2. 5C Response example paragraph (PreAP/honors and standard/emerging writer versions)
3. 5C Paragraph Structure student handout (color and grayscale)
4. 5C Response Writing Task and Explanation (editable; digital and print)
5. Adjectives to Describe Character 
6. 5C Character Analysis Paragraph Scoring Guide
7. Bookmarks (color and grayscale)
8. Classroom poster (color and grayscale)
9. Lesson Overview (includes content standards)

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