Cobalt Education
TEEL stands for Topic sentence, Evidence/Explanation, Explanation/Evidence, and Link. Depending on context, preference, or who you ask, the first E stands for Evidence/Explanation, and the second for the one not covered previously!
The acronym serves as a topdown guide to the structure of an analytical, persuasive or otherwise informative paragraph. Depending on the length of the paragraph, you can expand the number of EE’s (evidence + explanation) to suit the size, depth and purpose of the paragraph. For example, you’ll likely only use one set of evidence and explanation in the SEHS Persuasive Writing component, while something like a VCE essay may easily require more than one.
TEEL is used to structure paragraphs for clarity. TEEL prevents the naturally nonlinear flow of a student’s thinking on the page from interrupting the flow and message that is delivered to a reader, or marker. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to use TEEL in competitive exams, since the stakes are way too high to rely on a marker to be meticulous, motivated and patient enough to pry open an essay to uncover points made.
These are your introduction to the topic, best illustrated with a few examples.
| Prompt | Argument | Topic sentence |
|---|---|---|
| Social media has had overwhelmingly negative effects. | Social media effects young people by setting unrealistic expectations on young peoples’ bodies. | By supplying an endless stream of glamorous, filtered, and curated body images, social media imposes unattainable expectations that damage young people’s mental health. |
It is important to signpost the relevance of the discussion to the main contention in the topic sentence. For example, the social media topic sentence directly states “damage”, which clearly suggests that the negative effect we’re talking about is on mental health. If we had instead said the following:
By supplying an endless stream of glamorous, edited, and controlled body images, social media has imprinted unattainable expectations upon young people.
This would be for a different thing entirely; perhaps not even an argument. We’d be arguing, from a matter of fact, evidence-based perspective as to how social media does this, or an analysis of different evidences. That would be better suited to perhaps a scientific article, as opposed to a persuasive essay.
TLDR; The topic sentence serves as the entry point into the argument. It tells the reader what this chunk of text does, without going into evidence, explanation or anything else. What, not how or why.
Literally anything that makes your argument not just an opinion. You should cite studies, trends, quotations, anything, really, that grounds your topic sentence in reality.
For the SEHS exam, you want to stick to general trends, since you are not given any citable evidence. Stick to broad magnitudes, not specific claims. For example, if you’re trying to evidence the topic sentence from before, instead of saying
Studies have continually shown that 99.99% of young people using social media have depression, anxiety and eating disorders.
Say something broader, and more defensible, like
Studies have continually established links between young peoples’ usage of social media, and higher incidences of depression, anxiety and eating disorders.
Why? We need to hedge our statements using words like “higher incidences of” instead of “have”, which requires us to prove much less.
The most important takeaway is to avoid unrealistic claims at all costs. Saying something like “all people who use social media have depression” will hurt your credibility not just in the current argument, but throughout your entire essay.
The most important part of the paragraph. This is where your work really comes in, where you do the actual persuasion. Otherwise, it’s just a statement + evidence.
Your goal here is, broadly, to link your evidence to the topic sentence. You’re saying things like,
By feeding young people an endless stream of images, videos and posts, social media imprints an unrealistic, curated lifestyle template. This fosters constant social comparison, harming body image, identity and achievement, especially when quietly compounded over formative years.
Obviously, there is a lot of fancy language in that sentence, which is a level above clarity. Cutting out all the fancy words, the essence looks something like this,
Social media shows young people unrealistic lifestyles. This makes them compare themselves to others, which can harm how they see themselves*, their bodies, and their success.
*Note that “themselves” and “their bodies” are not exclusive. This is something that the first paragraph does better.
The idea here is to provide an explanation on top of your evidence that smoothens it, by providing a plausible method of action, or simply explaining it further. In the previous example, we gave the evidence a plausible action path, i.e., we stated that “social media is linked to bad stuff”, and then said “the reason why it’s not just coincidence is because of explanation”.
If our explanation was more direct, we wouldn’t have to do that, and instead spend our time interpreting the evidence.
For example, if our argument was “social media keeps people up at night”, and the evidence (obviously fabricated, you’d never make up statistics/studies in an exam) was “MIT scientists have established that people who use social media 30 minutes before sleeping have 30% lower sleep quality (by some metric)”, our explanation would shift into using the evidence to establish exactly why that’s a bad thing (it’s pretty obvious, but never take that for granted).
The most straightforward part. If you’ve made the argument well, you already know what the link is—you just have to say it out loud. The question you’re asking yourself is what does this argument prove?
In the social media example, a raw version of the link looks like,
“Social media has significantly harmed the mental health of the younger generation.”
Good idea, but it’s slightly raw. It just restates the point and stops. A polished link does two extra things: it echoes the language of your topic sentence (tying the paragraph into a neat loop), and it points back to the essay’s overall question.
“By imprinting these unrealistic templates on developing minds, social media has become an major driver of the mental health crisis facing today’s youth, directly causing significant suffering.”
Same claim, but with bigger words, and nicer flow.
TEEL is fundamentally not rigid. Things can be moved around; it simply serves as a way for you to clearly argue, analyse and state points such that a reader does not have to go scouring through your essay to uncover a point you might not have even made.
It only takes a few, concentrated reads to understand how TEEL really shows up in the wild. This is how we teach at Cobalt, the first point is recognition!
Take the following article from The Conversation. Try and find the TEEL. You’ll probably not get it the first time around, but you’ll start to see familiar ideas. For example, one could think of the title itself as a topic sentence.
Put yourself in the shoes of the author; you (the author) are trying to convince people, that “we can’t trust common sense but we can trust science.” This can kind of be thought of as a massive body paragraph; we’re arguing something highly specific here. So it’s a huge TEEEEEEEE…EEEEEEEL!
Evidence? So much!
When a group of Australians was asked why they believed climate change was not happening, about one in three (36.5%) said it was “common sense”, according to a report published last year by the CSIRO. This was the most popular reason for their opinion, with only 11.3% saying their belief that climate change was not happening was based on scientific research.
This is evidence!
Then, the explanation (after another block of evidence).
It seems the greater the rejection of climate science, the greater the reliance on common sense as a guiding principle.
Notice how the explanation looks slightly small. Why?
It’s because the author doesn’t feel the need to spell out too explicitly why this data supports the contention. They treat climate change as a fact most people accept, point at the figures, and let you draw the conclusion yourself: “Look! The people leaning on common sense are the ones who end up rejecting scientific reasoning!”
At some level, the author trusts you to understand the idea without it being written down, and even when they feel the need to whisper in your ear, it’s a single sentence, targeting a minority who missed why the evidence mattered; the line makes its place obvious.
Obviously, at a SEHS level, do not do this. The Conversation writes opinion/analysis for an audience that doesn’t need to be spoonfed, so it can afford to leave reasoning implied, for now. A SEHS student cannot. You must make your explanation tangible, on the paper, and clear, the marker rewards what you write, not what you imply.
The Link here reads much more like explanation. Why? Because the contention is the topic sentence—there’s only one argument, so there’s nothing further to link back to.
To see why, it helps to recognise that a link normally does two jobs.
In this article, the “paragraph“‘s point and the overall contention are the same thing. So job 2 becomes linking the argument back to itself, which is pointless. With job 2 gone, all that’s left is job 1, which looks a lot like just explaining your point. That’s why the link keeps dissolving into explanation.
For competitive writing, don’t skip a link!
This only works because the article is, in effect, one giant body paragraph built on one contention. Your SEHS essay never is! It always has a contention sitting above several body paragraphs, so job 2 is always alive. Every one of your paragraphs has somewhere to link back to.