Painless Paragraphs: The NO TEARS Plan for Composing Academic Prose

Strong paragraph organization is the key to effective synthesis and logical flow of ideas in academic writing. If you’ve heard us talk about paragraphing before, you’ve likely heard of the MEAL plan. A new mnemonic device for paragraphing, called the NO TEARS plan, can also help guide you as you craft an argument paragraph by paragraph. Read on to learn more. 

The Walden Writing Center teaches a paragraphing tool called the MEAL Plan, developed by Duke University’s Thompson Writing Program. The MEAL plan is a mnemonic device designed to help writers support their opinions and arguments with clear reasoning and cited evidence – and to both acknowledge and discuss alternate points of view and conflicting evidence. It divides paragraph elements into four parts:

Main Idea
Evidence
Analysis
Lead Out

To learn more about the MEAL Plan, check out the Writing Center's MEAL Plan webpage and our blog series called Breaking Down the Meal Plan.  

The MEAL acronym is useful in its simplicity. However, the short acronym doesn’t make it clear that Evidence and Analysis can and should alternate and repeat as needed. For longer assignments, logical organization and effective synthesis become more difficult, especially as students incorporate a wider variety of scholarly perspectives into their work. The NO TEARS plan is a paragraphing tool that I developed that emphasizes this repetition and complexity more overtly, though both MEAL and NO TEARS can be used to guide academic body paragraphs. Like the MEAL acronym, the NO TEARS plan serves as a checklist for the elements of a paragraph:

Nothing Omitted:

• Topic Sentence
• Evidence
• Analysis
• Repeat as necessary
• Synthesis

Here's how it works. When reviewing a scholarly paper, I expect each paragraph to start with a clear topic sentence that states what the paragraph is about. The topic sentence (T) contains a claim that is supported by one or more following sentences presenting evidence (E) to support that claim. 

Rather than simply presenting the evidence and being done with it, however, the writer must also analyze (A) the evidence to answer questions like "How is this known?" and "What details of how this information was found, collected, or otherwise arrived at influence its reading, interpretation, or application?" 

So far, NO TEARS matches the MEAL plan: Topic Sentence/Main Idea, Evidence, Analysis. However, what the MEAL acronym doesn’t make clear is that some evidence may require more extensive analysis and discussion (e.g., controversial claims), or may warrant further articulation of how it aligns/agrees with or doesn’t align/agree with other sources. While an instructor can teach the MEAL plan emphasizing the repetition of evidence and analysis as needed, the NO TEARS acronym makes this explicit: repeat as necessary (R).

Once you have finished presenting and analyzing the evidence, it’s time to synthesize (S) the findings and explain to the reader what these things mean when put together – and, more specifically, the ramifications of all the things that you’ve discussed to your paragraph’s topic, section, or paper as a whole. The S of NO TEARS aligns with the L  of the MEAL plan model: Synthesis implies a sentence that wraps up the content of the current paragraph, while lead out encompasses concluding the ideas, thus preparing readers to transition to the next paragraph.

Here’s another way of understanding the sentence-by-sentence breakdown of the NO TEARS plan:

Paragraph:

1.      Topic Sentence: State what you’re writing about in this paragraph.

2.      Evidence/Argumentation: Support the claim you’ve made in your topic sentence.

3.      Analysis: Discuss the evidence and how it connects to your topic, explaining this as necessary.

4.      Repeat steps 2-3 as necessary.

5.      Synthesis: Discuss what all of these things mean when put together and conclude the paragraph.

If you follow these steps, it’s very easy to write papers that are convincing, grounded in the literature, and easy to follow. Sometimes this follows strict sentence-by-sentence divisions, and sometimes the elements are mixed into the same sentence (this is increasingly expected at the doctoral level, as part of making more complex arguments). Here’s an example of what this looks like:

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s economy was strongly affected by the Great Recession of 2006-2010 (Topic Sentence). The estimated total value of commercial real estate in the City of Boston dropped by $2 billion from January 2006 to December 2006 (Graves, 2010; Evidence). Residential real estate prices in Boston dropped by 53% in this same period (Nidaye, 2012; Evidence and Analysis comparing it to the previous sentence). This significant change in property values over a short period of time had significant ramifications for area businesses (Synthesized new claim requiring additional evidence to support). For example, short-term interest rates increased by 15%, (Evidence) a record increase that made it difficult for businesses to borrow money (Nehru, 2006; Ren, 2015; Evidence and Analysis). These increased borrowing costs were a contributing factor in construction industry layoffs in Greater Boston, with 15,432 sector jobs lost in 2007 (Baluta, 2007; Evidence and Synthesis). Several sectors of the state’s economy negatively felt the Great Recession’s impact (Synthesis). 

*References Page available upon request

The NO TEARS plan, along with other systems like the MEAL Plan, are simply methods of paragraphing. In the end, these acronyms are tools to help you achieve the purpose of academic writing. How you get there is up to you.

Now it's your turn. Practice using the NO TEARS plan for paragraphs in your next paper. Let us know how it goes in the comments section below. 

Basil K. Considine is a Dissertation Editor and Contributing Faculty in the Walden University Academic Skills Center. Outside of Walden, Basil is the artistic director of Really Spicy Opera, a chamber opera company specializing in new musical works for the theatrical stage.

Never miss a new post; Opt-out at any time