reading response

Using P.I.E. to Improve Writing

The ideas on this page will form the basis for how you work within the Weekly DFs, and they will also be useful when you write your papers. In fact, much of what you read here is applicable to many situations outside of school where you are asked to present your ideas or engage in discussions that require critical thinking,

Good writing and discussion are the balance of the insightful ideas and details that represent critical thinking. Often, the strongest ideas are abstract and can be hard to clearly express in writing. You may have a good idea but are not able to clearly articulate it or provide evidence that supports the idea’s validity. The Point, Illustrate, Explain (PIE) system is one way to help you develop and more clearly articulate insightful, interesting ideas that are also fully supported with specific details. PIE also will help you present your ideas in an organized way.

You will begin using PIE right away in the Weekly Discussion Forums. These forums are designed to help you think more critically about the texts we read and the ideas that you want to incorporate into your papers. We will soon be covering more thoroughly how to use sources effectively and correctly in your writing, but PIE is a start in that direction.

One of the key features of good academic writing—in fact, writing of any kind—is that it most often says “more about less,” which is part of what PIE will help you do. What this means is that, instead of many simple ideas that are briefly explored, good, interesting writing will explore only a few ideas but will do so by providing a lot of details. Examine the following steps of PIE and the example of PIE in use to understand how to write more about less, and in so doing, produce writing that is interesting and insightful.

Here is the “PIE” system, followed by two examples:

Point:

Begin by making the claim you want to make in the discussion forum or a section of the paper. The claim you make is your point. Your point will most likely be the topic sentence of your paragraph. In papers, the point should also clearly connect to your overall thesis. A claim is never a fact and instead expresses a point of view that may not be the same as everyone else's.

Illustration:

Provide evidence to illustrate and support that point. In other words, always include a quote. If you are quoting an article, this would be where you directly quote the author. For textual analysis, this is where you’d cite a part of the text. If you are posting in the discussion forum, here’s where you should include a quote from a peer and/or one of the readings for the week. Note: you may use more than one piece of evidence for your Illustration, depending on the claim and how much evidence you have. Just be sure you take the time to explain how each piece of evidence supports your point. It is better to say a lot about a little than a little about a lot.

Explanation:

Explain how the illustration (evidence/quote) shows your point (claim) and explain why it is important or how it relates to your overall point (the main point of your discussion forum, the topic sentence of your paragraph and/or the overall focus/thesis of your essay) The act of explaining how and why the evidence connects to your thesis is the act of analyzing the evidence. This part of PIE should be the longest.

PIE Example

The paragraph below is the post from a student in English 101, responding to the question, “What seems to be the most important point Sherman Alexie makes in “the Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me”? (We will not be reading this text, but some of you may be familiar with it. In any case, this post serves as an “A” quality example.)

(P is highlighted; I is italicized; E is bolded)

Alexie stresses the life-saving potential that books/reading have had in his own life and can have for others who, like him, come from marginalized parts of American culture. But clearly, his point is that learning to read is not by itself enough to make it. He says, “As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world…I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books late at night until I could barely keep my eyes open…I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life.” Implied here is that other Indian kids who were not as smart, arrogant or lucky maybe did not have the same success that Alexie has had in his life. When he says that Indian kids were not expected to succeed in the “non-Indian world” he is acknowledging that American Indian history is filled with the failure of Indian culture to compete and even survive in the “non-Indian” larger culture. It seems to me that “smart” and “lucky” counted for a lot of his success, but if he wasn’t also “arrogant,” maybe he would not have done so well. It is his arrogance that allowed him to refuse to fail because his arrogance is what told him not to accept what others expected of him. And he says he “loved those books,” but I think he also loved himself. Why else would he be trying to save his own life? So his point seems to be that learning to read was really important for him, but loving himself and refusing to accept the roles/stereotypes that had been laid out for him to follow are what allowed the power of reading to make a difference in his life.

Notice here that the explanation is the longest part of the entry. This point is important—when you are discussing someone else’s ideas/work, you do not want to fill your comments with quotes. You need to write more than the quoted material itself.

Another way to think about PIE is a mix of your voice and the voices of others:

The point is one that YOU make – it should be your observation, your idea, YOUR VOICE.

The illustration you use to support your point (either a quote or paraphrase) is the SOMEONE ELSE’S VOICE– you will be summarizing a specific section of the essay or quoting an author directly.

The explanation is YOUR VOICE again: you are letting your readers/audience know how the quote or paraphrase you’ve chosen shows your point, develops or connects to your thesis (if part of a paper), and why it is important for your overall idea.

Below is an example of PIE used successfully in a Discussion Forum (the topic was a different reading done for class); again, the point is in regular text, the illustration is in italics and the explanation is in bold:

Hi, Cecilia. you identified a key theme in the text similar to my own point of view, but your take on the main point was a bit different. You wrote, "Smith works to show us the differences in personality between herself and her twin sister. Her main point seems to be that she and her twin are very different from each other." To me, it seems that Smith was highlighting not only how different she was from her sister, but also how she had been born ten minutes earlier than her sister, so she got stuck—almost by default—in the role of the lonely protector. I couldn't help but think that Smith used her differences to alienate herself from her family, and always wondered "Who will protect me?" The main point of the essay for me is that Smith constantly battled with her loneliness created by having an alcoholic father and how she had no parental guidance to help her understand life. I am not disagreeing with your point, I just saw loneliness mentioned so many times in this essay, that it kind of downplayed the fact that Smith was a twin. In fact, Smith says, “Twin though I may have been, I was also an adolescent child of a drunk. I wanted nothing more than to be far away from both realities.”Here, she is clearly stressing that the two things together created her main struggles as a kid.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind when Using P.I.E.

One common misstep when responding to classmates is to write a point that really doesn't do much other than agree with what a classmate said. If your response to a classmate includes phrases such as " I agree with you 100%," "You are completely right," "I love the idea you expressed," etc., then your post is most likely not going to add an idea, no matter how many words you use to explain why you agree. Remember that the most interesting ideas are found, not in similarity, but in difference. Therefore, practice looking for those differences between your ideas and your classmates' and posing your point of view more like the student above who used the word "although" to set up how her idea was going to be different from her classmate's.

Remember, too, that using PIE successfully means that you will always need to include direct quotes, either from something we read or that a classmate posted.

When you write your first few posts, before submitting them, see if you can identify the three parts of PIE. If you can’t find all three parts, rethink and revise your post.