• Describe strategies for doing preliminary research on a topic
• Describe strategies for synthesizing research with your own ideas

Using MEAL to Incorporate Evidence

Imagine you’ve chosen to write a research paper with the following thesis statement:

Starting the high school day later improves students’ overall success by promoting better health, improving academic performance, and supporting emotional well-being.

To support this thesis, you’ve broken your paper into three body sections:

1. Health outcomes
2. Academic performance
3. Emotional and mental well-being

You’re working on the first body section, which focuses on how later start times improve physical health. While reviewing your sources, you come across a compelling study by Kelley et al. (2017), published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. It tracked changes in student health and academic performance when a UK school shifted its start time from 8:50 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. for two years. In it, you read the following:

“Implementing a 10 a.m. start saw a decrease in student illness after 2 years of over 50%, and reverting to an 8:50 a.m. start reversed this improvement, leading to an increase of 30% in student illness.”

This seems like a great fit to support your claim that delaying school start times benefits student health. Now that you’ve decided to use this piece of evidence, let’s practice using the MEAL paragraph method to incorporate it into your paper.

• M – Main Idea: Introduce the central point of your paragraph.
• E – Evidence: Support your main idea with information from a credible source.
• A – Analysis: Explain how the evidence supports your main idea.
• L – Link: Connect the paragraph back to your thesis or transition to the next point.

Step 1: Start with the Main Idea (M)

The first sentence in your paragraph should introduce the point you want to make. This is your topic sentence, and it should clearly reflect your opinion or claim.

Step 2: Add Your Evidence (E)

Now it’s time to bring in the quote from Kelley et al. You could quote it directly, paraphrase it, or summarize the key point—but either way, your job is to use it purposefully, not just copy-paste it.

STEP 3: Analyze the Evidence (A)

This part is about your voice. What does the evidence show? Why does it matter? What’s your takeaway?

Step 4: Link It Back (L)

Your last sentence should wrap things up. Remind your reader why this matters for your paper as a whole—or transition to your next point.

Now that you’ve built a complete MEAL paragraph, you can plug it right into the section of your paper about student health—it’s already structured, supported, and in your voice. As you write other sections (and even other papers), you can return to this same method: start with your point, support it with evidence, explain why it matters, and connect it back to your main idea. It’s a clear, reliable way to make your writing stronger and more persuasive.