How long should an ib commentary be

An excellent way of keeping your entire commentary in focus is, asking yourself these simple yet significant questions:. Remember it's not a grocery list of memorized terms- barfed out in a time period of 2 hours. It is supposed to be an intricate and insightful response to what you as a reader, understand from the text, the author's intended message.

The planning phase is perhaps the most important, even more important than the writing phase which comes naturally succeeding it, if planning goes well the written should be equally responsive. Here is another suggestion for a structure which requires about minutes of planning, but is still just as efficient-.

An ideal commentary has ideas. Remember to focus more on developing the ideas than to have more of them. Don't be! Here everything will be made clear as together we'll decipher a poem. Our poem of choice is The Daffodils by William Wordsworth. Ironically, the most important part of IB English Paper 1 is not the analysis itself well it is, but not really. The part you have to get right the first time is the plan. Before you begin writing, you should plan out your commentary in sufficient detail.

I am very persuasive on why you should plan well in another blog post, but to cut to the chase here: You will lose track of time, thought and sanity if you do not have a clear road map of every part of your commentary before you begin writing. Watch our quick guide on planning an IB English Paper 1 commentary.

Jackson is an IB 45 graduate and English tutor. Thanks Lily. Thank you so much, I am writing my first in exam tomorrow. This was so much help, would like to see more like this. Love your work! Thank you so much! I love your post. Yes, please do! I have recently started the course and cannot find an explanation on how to do the Paper 1….

Hi Jackson. Being a 45 student, are there any epiphanies that you could share on the learnings you had along the way? That would be really helpful. A lot of the method for planning and structuring the commentary at HL is similar to the SL method, so what follows is some useful advice on how to Compare and Contrast.

For both HL and SL, your commentary is going to be a thread of individual points. For each of these, you should always make sure to make your point , provide a quotation and then give some linguistic analysis. The best chance you can have of success in this subject is to do multiple full practice commentaries, and also many more practice plans. Beyond that, Elite IB are happy to offer you flexible and effective tuition to bring your skills in Paper 1 up to a very high level. The best resources, in your inbox.

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Revision Courses. Online Tuition. Get your support started today. In-person and online IB courses at key stages of the academic year. Register Now. I think ideas and themes takes a non-linear approach. So take the main 2 or 3 themes and ideas and write your paragraphs on those.

The section approach is a linear one. So for a poem, you just go stanza by stanza, or for prose, paragraph by paragraph. The section by section or linear analysis often does not score well in the Oral exam, or Commentary. It is better to work from a thematic concept and move forward from there. It is also important to note, that many devices compliment one another- IE: if you are discussing diction- no doubt you would also want to talk about tone, atmosphere, and even imagery.

Would ideas include one such as the strangeness of how they play ping pong, the cultural differences and the effect of the tsunami? Also, would you then talk about different techniques within the paragraphs to support that point and thus the overall purpose of the article? One thing that I struggle with is seeing a purpose but not finding specific techniques to analyse. Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks. The examiner uses this exact checklist to Read more…. For my Paper 1 commentaries, I always spent 20 to 25 minutes at the start of the exam planning what I would write.