Focus on Essays How to write an IB essay

Let’s first rely on our prior knowledge * It is an insult to begin as if you are new to essays as you have done this before and it would be best to go from what you know. * You have written essays in Year 9 for Inspector Calls and the Giver and in Year 10 for Romeo and Juliet in Semester 1 and perhaps for practice for The Catcher in the Rye.

Let’s begin by comparing the differences between essays and commentaries, as we all agree this is something we are confident in. COMMENTARIES Introductions: text, writer, thesis Commentary layout: Intro, body, transition, body....conclusion Organization, B: Obey our thesis - embedded quotations, transitional sentences Paragraph structure: PEERL or PEEDEA Focus of commentaries: Dissecting and stylistic devices analysis from a brief passage. What do you have to do in a commentary for A? stylistic devices and evidence What do you have to do for C? Spelling, register, vocabulary ESSAYS Introductions: text, writer, thesis, Essay layout: Intro, body, transition, body....conclusion Organisation, B: Obey the thesis - embedded quotations, transitional sentences Paragraph structure: PEERL Focus of Essays: Critical analysis with knowledge of text as a whole. How and why is still relevance. What do you have to do in an essay for a A? Critical analysis What do you have to do for C?

The Process For essay writing: “It wont happen over night but it will happen.”

What is the best way to improve in future essays Write up the feedback from your prior assignments and find ways to improve on prior errors. For example, if you have articles or tense circled as errors then look this up in your Pocket Style Manual. If you are having issues with register, check the guide and if still confused ask your teacher. When writing your new assignment have the written up notes of what you did wrong last time to aim to improve in the next essay.

Class approach In the past I have provided generalised feedback on common errors we are doing so that we can aim to avoid these in the future, but it can be easy to become too complacent and read over these and think, oh I’m not doing that, but in fact - unfortunately - many of us are. We are now going to look at some specific examples of work from the class and look at how we can improve specific paragraphs. The purpose of doing so is to see what we are doing as a whole and how this can be improved. Please remember we are all doing this not only the one student whose work is being showed. We must view the work that will appear in the following slides with respect and appreciate that this is a helpful learning opportunity and as soon as it becomes an opportunity for disrespect we can no longer continue with the activity.