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Daedalus

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Daedalus last won the day on January 10 2022

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  1. The title is pretty much self-explanatory (lol) but if not, this is a post about writing an a1 language ee, primarily focused on english obviously, and based largely on personal experience. If you have any questions about this post (turned out longer than I expected!) or the ee itself, send me a message. Also, if you have a draft and are looking for feedback, I might be able to help. Ground rules first - you need to have a good grasp of your the language you are writing your extended essay (latin and ancient greek possibly excepted) -- and this probably means a good grade in the relevant class. Choosing good supervisor, and one you are on good terms with, is also a good idea. You should download the Extended Essay guide as soon as you have decided on your subject and read the introductory bits, as well as the parts specific to Group 1 languages, several times through. You should also probably set up a folder on your computer for extended essay related files - I have for subfolders 'resources', 'example essays', 'quotes' (from the book I used), and then the various stages of the draft. Organization will eventually become key in the process - you'd be amazed at how many people send off the wrong version of their essays, year after year, and even more waste dozens of sheets of paper printing different versions. The extended essay can probably claim the dubious honor of being effectively responsible for hectares worth of deforestation. Also, there are two categories of extended essays in group 1 - involving writing in its original form, and involving a comparison between writing in translation (or from a foreign language, if you speak it well) and writing in its original form. I wrote the former, so this guide will probably be biased in that direction. Won't hurt to read it though. On to the process. I'll set it out as a list because it's easier to read in pieces (quantized form, as my physics-filled mind suggests), and because it's easier to find the place you're at for reference. Choosing the text(s). Some people will suggest choosing the literature you love best, but as this generally tends to be either Tolkien or Rowling (or, god forbid, Meyers), I wouldn't recommend it. Enthusiasm is no substitute for originality and literary value. You are best off going, I think, for a little studied and recent novel that won't have been critically exhausted but is clearly literary. Your supervisor can probably recommend some good books; (more or less) contemporary writers to look out for include Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Mario Vargas Llosa (nobel 2010), Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith, Philip Roth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and David Mitchell (off the top of my head). Looking back I realize it would have been far easier to compare two books - look for a common theme, motif, etc. - and another good idea is to find a point in the critical context you can argue with. The classic example of the latter would be proving/disproving racism in Heart of Darkness, which, by the by, I seriously counsel you against doing. Classic texts have been done so many times that the examiner will be annoyed and most likely you will end up repeating something that has been said before. That said, you should try to find text(s) you like. Drama and poetry are interesting in this sense because you can achieve quite a bit of comparative depth and you won't necessarily be unable to look at the texts involved when you're done - novels are probably harder to deal with, if ultimately more rewarding. Research (i): the text(s). First thing to do is to read the novels, plays, or poems you are looking at. And then read them again. I have an odd phobia of highlighting or even breaking the spine of for that matter anything that's been printed, so I copy out entire quotes and make notes on them in a word document. Takes forever - but it helps understand the novel, and it makes writing the damn thing a lot easier. Whatever works for you - make liberal use of post-its, highlighters, or keyboards in your quest to form a complete understanding of the text(s). Understanding the text (henceforth referred to in singular) also implies understanding the critical context, which you will need to briefly outline in your introduction and probably refer to in your arguments, so try to find university documents and stuff like that. Also important to understand the literary context a little bit; intertextuality is basically in every book you read these days, to various extents. To writers like Joyce or Eliot intertextuality is not just useful, it's fundamental. Research (ii): extended essays. The other thing you should probably get familiar with is the general way extended essays work. We have a decent database; other than that, your supervisor might be able to give you some examples. Ask her also for the examiner's report, which gives invaluable feedback in terms of what to avoid. In terms of the examples, read both the really good ones and the really poor ones, and maybe make some notes on what people did right/wrong. Timing. This is somewhere between more crucial than people think and not as crucial as supervisors claim. For example, not doing it during the summer is not really a problem, unless you enjoy sleeping. If you're smart you'll do it during the summer, if you're lazy and/or otherwise preoccupied, like I was, you can get away with doing it later. More important is doing it in one bit. You can't do bits and pieces and over the courses of months end up with a good ee -- to some extent you have to be able to hold everything you have written/are going to write in your head during the process. My suggestion is to finish it in a week or two, after you have completed all the research and so on, and work on it intensively. After maybe one round of corrections, maybe giving a printed copy to your supervisor and changing it a little, set it aside for two weeks. This tip I technically learned from Stephen King, who apparently does it when he writes his books. How well it works for him is debatable; what is not is that setting the essay aside is an invaluable aid in getting a detached and objective perspective. Be heartless with your essay when you're correcting it. Ask random people you know who are good at English (this forum might be a good resource) for feedback, even if it's just so much as whether it feels like an A or a C. Redrafting and timing sort of go hand-in-hand - for example, the earlier you finish it, the more time you have to redraft. My best guess is that about 65% of your final grade is how good the first draft was, and the other 35% how well you revised. The implication, of course, is if you play the deadlines right you can get almost a third of the marks (12 points of 36) just by polishing it properly. That's more than the difference between a D and a B. Organization. As I mentioned before, it's a good idea to have a folder on your computer to organize the relevant files. A physical folder is a useful addition - first because it's a pain flipping back and forth between word documents, second because you can highlight, post-it-mark, or otherwise annotate printed notes, and third because it's nice to have a copy of it all afterwards. Depending on how the process goes you might also feel like destroying everything to do with the extended essay after it's handed in, in which case it's much more satisfying to burn a lot of physical papers than pressing the delete button. Research (iii): research question. This is probably the hardest part of the entire process. When I wrote my extended essay I had a sort of essay written without a research question at all, and then I was trying to reverse-tailor it to make it make sense. Didn't come out to well (ended up rewriting the entire thing from scratch!) so my advice is get a solid research question phrased and set in stone even before you begin your essay itself, especially considering it has to form the basis of the introduction. Freewriting (see next point) is quite useful for this stage of the process, but apart from that it's purely a question of writing down and crossing out ideas. With luck you should be able to bounce a couple off your supervisor, but mostly it's a solitary process, and here past extended essays as well as the IBO's guide will come in useful. Make sure it has a self-evidently literary focus - key words like theme, motif, lexis, etc will help you in this respect - and also that it's not too long or awkwardly phrased. Freewriting. You can probably google this and find out a fair bit about it, but the fundamental idea is to set a timer - 10 minutes at least I'd suggest, 25 at most - and write fluidly, non-stop, for the whole time. The idea is to leave behind all considerations of form, structure, elegance, eloquence... and just write. The brain is a much faster instrument than the fingers, so after a while - almost magically - you'll find that it's harder to get everything down on paper than keep writing for the set time. Freewrites can be extremely useful for brainstorming and planning essays, and when you realize that after a couple of 25 minute freewrites you basically have around the 4000 words you will need at the end, it makes the whole task seem much easier. The best way to mine freewrites, I find, is either to bold sections you might want to use, and maybe collect these arguments in a document dedicated to setting out the structure, or to use comments (i.e. in MS Word) for bringing attention to the most important ideas. The thing about freewriting is it's completely customizable to your needs - some people like using them, some people don't, and a lot of people use them in a completely different way from me. Like everything else I say in this document, take it with a grain of salt. These are my ideas, developed out of the failures of my own extended essay writing process, and in the end, they really are only mine. Writing. Getting down to the actual writing process can be a bit of a pain. I tend not to work in my collected ee document simply because it's large and messy - I copy and paste out into a "current" file which helps me work more cleanly, and also lets me keep an eye on the various word counts. Apart from that the best thing is to remove distractions, get prepared with some water and a coffee if you like, and get to writing. Turning off the internet is probably a good way to keep facebook out of the equation, but it can slow you down when you need wikipedia or google. Personally I just killed the internet because I wasn't able to control myself, but this is another area where you should find whatever works for you. Another good idea is to read what you're writing aloud to get more of a sense of the rhythm and the diction of the whole thing. You have a lot of elements to balance - tone, syntax, sentence length, literariness, conjunctions, etc - and it can get a bit lopsided sometimes. My sentences tend to come out long and complex, because I write the first half and then look at something else and then look at the last few words and keep writing and so on. It's best to keep the essay tight and flowing easily, and conjunctions are especially important here. However is useful but it sounds less clumsy if you don't start sentences with it (i.e. This point, however, must also be considered in light of...); furthermore and moreover are best used sparsely. Other good words or phrases to keep in mind, in the interests of variance: nevertheless, at the same, doubtless, regardless, in retrospect, therefore (use like however), whereas, nonetheless, similarly. Structure. If you've seen the examples you'll have realized that there's no really set pattern here (apart from what the IBO requires of you). I used subheadings to make the essay easier to read and understand, but mostly, to be honest, it was helpful for breaking down the actual writing process into bits. It's best (though not always possible) to have a clear relationship between consecutive sections, and since the essay must be structured as an argument sections can help you make the development of thought clearer. Purely technical points include having the abstract on a page of it's own, putting a page break after the contents page, etc. To make counting the words easier, I had an excel document with three columns - name of section, anticipated word count, and current word count - with autosum functions at the bottom of the latter two columns. As I changed a section in the "current" page I would keep the word count file updated, so I always knew where I was with respect to the word count - and this also helps with the writing, that is, knowing how many words you intend to 'spend' on each section. On the subject of word counts, briefly -- you should keep it under or at 4000; there's a certain symmetry to hitting the target perfectly but also consider the fact that this has absolutely no importance in the grand scheme of things. Examiners will only count the number of words if it's obvious you've given a false one (i.e. far over or far under), so high fidelity is not particularly essential. I would counsel you against, however, actually citing a word count about 4000. Examiner's get paid by the document and they are, at least in our imaginations, easily irritated. Deal with them as you would with an angry wild beast - take no risks. Introduction. The IBO criteria in this respect is quite clear: your introduction must not be the same as your conclusion. The main focus should be your research question and why you've chosen it, and the word 'significance' is best mentioned here explicitly to hit the criteria. You can give some critical context, and I'd suggest mentioning the sources you are going to be citing in your actual essay. If your text is not well known, and it's probably best if it isn't, you can also use the introduction to give a brief (brief!) summary of the novel's themes, topics, ideas, et cetera. It might be a good idea to go back to the introduction once you've written your essay, maybe mention the main points or structure of the argument in some way, but avoid implying your conclusions - the understanding of the reader should develop with the essay, and the introduction is more of an orientation marker than a summary of the essay. You already have an abstract to write for the latter. Citations and references. Again, the IBO gives you a lot of freedom in this area, partly because it's an international curriculum, and probably also because if they made it stricter people would invariably mess up. The basic idea is to choose a citation system early on, maybe indicate it near the top of your biography - standard are stuff like MLA, APA, or Chicago. There's a great website which allows you to automatically generate them and it's quite useful, but be sure to make sure the formatting is correct when you've actually pasted them in. Footnotes are probably better than endnotes, and using inline references is intelligent as well (e.g. Leavis insisted that criticism should involve the shaping of contemporary sensibility (Bilan 61)). Page numbers in your main text could be accomplished with just the number in brackets, though if you have multiple it might be a bit more complex. Using footnotes for page citations is awkward and wasteful; and since examiners aren't required to read footnotes, it would not make sense to write anything crucial to your argument there. I used mine mostly for clarification or context; some people avoid them altogether. The actual bibliography is a must, though, and avoid web pages here - especially wikipedia and sparknotes. If it looks a bit thin, you might be able to through-cite using the wikipedia bibliographies at the bottom of the page. Conclusion. Your conclusion is supposed to be neither a summary of your arguments nor a reiteration of your introduction; rather, it should be a new 'synthesis' in the light of your arguments, whatever that means. There's a fair bit of freedom in terms of the relative sizes of your essay's components - my introduction and conclusion were both fairly long - but I'd suggest having around 400 words here at least. It's a good idea to recycle some of the key words of your argument, as well as those integrated into your research question, and if possible mention a nice point that follows from your arguments but is not necessary equivalent to them -- something that's not included in your abstract and makes the essay worth reading; to give it a bit of shine, so to speak. If you're aiming for the highest grade it would be good not make a point that is too obvious, if that makes any sense. The ee is a very long process; it would be nice to come up with something original and interesting in the final part of your essay. But if that doesn't sound like you at all, don't sweat. As with IB labs, it's more about the process, the various components, than the final result. Abstract. The IB has pretty stringent requirements for the abstract, which you should follow to a T, including the word count. If you've followed my guidelines as well, this should be a fairly easy part of the essay, since all you're doing, essentially, is summarizing your ee's arguments, preferably in the order the essay presents them. Take your time here with the language and the construction of the sentences; this is like the cover of your essay in a lot of ways, and a good abstract can inject coherence into a very poorly organized essay. Your abstract, unlike your introduction, will also contain your conclusion, and for this reason it will force you to shrink down your entire essay into it's fundamental lines. Re-reviewing it after writing the abstract is recommended; it may change how you see some parts of the organization, and how the argument flows. Revision. If you time it properly, you should have a lot of time left for this (I didn't!). You will also, probably, be completely sick of anything to do with the damn document. But force yourself to come back to it, at all costs, and it's a good idea to print out copies for hand-written corrections. Ask your teacher to do this for you; ask your mother, etc. Then go back and work on the document itself. If there's a paragraph you think really doesn't work well, take it out, open a new document, rewrite it differently and put it back in. Being able to look at a small part of the essay at a time will make revising it seem like a far more manageable task. Another useful tip is to describe each paragraph in one, or at most a couple, of words. For some this will be easy; for others, almost impossible. That gives you an idea of how structurally rigid your essay is, how clearly the arguments follow each other, and how well you have paragraphed. It should also - hopefully - give you a direction in which to revise. Divide paragraphs that are made up of two distinct ideas; and, obviously, join two that are made up of one. Above all, leave yourself sufficient time for revision, and try to come back to it with new eyes. If you worked on it very intensely for a short period of time (like me: one weekend) you will basically know long passages off by heart, and your ability to look at it objectively will be completely gone. All it takes to regain that is to wait. Finalization. Eventually, in a moment of breathless, orgasmic joy, you will realize that it's time to finalize and submit your ee. Drink some champagne. Make sure the readability of the essay is good (i.e. large spacing, no weird (orange, yellow) colours, headers and footers all sorted out -- that you have your name, candidate number, page number, and various other details on each page. Read it over one last time, in a printed version, and do it very slowly. I guarantee you will find a typo. I had a really embarrassing one I only caught after I had sent it off. It didn't kill my grade, but it probably didn't help, so if you can avoid this ... do it. Then, print it off (probably a good idea not to double-side the final copy) and be done with it! PS - This post is about 3600 words long. The 4000 word target is not that bad, really!
  2. Just throwing this out there, because I see a lot of questions and a lot of wishy-washy answers about this... Your score in certain subjects is made up of components that are internally assessed and externally moderated Addition: some components, like your World Literature essay(s), ToK essay, and of course Extended Essay, are not moderated but assessed (i.e. all sent off) [thanks for lynyrd and imopotato for pointing out that the WL is not moderated] For others, like your IOC, Mathematics portfolios, Science Lab Reports, Economics Portfolio, (and so on), your teacher sends out a "representative" sample The size of this sample depends on the number of students in your class (imopotato cites the following; students in class : number of students' samples sent off: 5 or less : all | 6-20 : 5 | 21-41 : 8 | more than 41 : 10 |. This sounds reasonable to me. The sample consists of: the best score(s); the worst score(s); and the score(s) closest to the three quartiles (25%; 50%; 75%)... in other words a sample spread fairly accross the board The IB responds with a moderating curve, to adjust your teacher's scoring to the IB-school-wide standard This mechanism is not entirely easy to understand, but all you need to know is Sometimes all of the samples have been marked up, leading to a higher mark for all pieces handed in in the class Sometimes they are all marked down, leading to lower grades for everybody Sometimes (often, apparently) the top scores drop 1-2 marks, and the bottom ones gain 1-2 marks (imagine a sinuous sort of curve) I can't really vouch for the technical accuracy of these statements, because my teachers gave them to me (semi-confidentially), but you can be almost certain that they are correct. In terms of the implications ... the main one I guess is make sure you don't beg your teacher for marks, because you are putting an entire class' grades into jeopardy. An interesting side note is you can "cheat" in a sense and ensure your pieces of work aren't sent off for moderation, if you have a very obliging teacher. But I wouldn't recommend this; firstly because, as well all know from ToK, induction is not a reliable process (i.e. this could change for next year), and secondly, a teacher that obliging probably will cause the entire grade to be moderated down anyways. One thing you can do is contact your IB Coordinator if you think your teacher is grading you poorly. Because if he is, and you're still doing top-notch work, your own score might suffer. Anything to add or subtract from this is appreciated. Update on external assessment. Turns out your IB Coordinator sends materials directly to the Examiners as told by IBO, who mark a large stack of papers and send a certain sample (following the same guidelines as above) to be remarked by another Examiner. It goes up in terms of seniority, in some way or another, so some papers end up being marked three times (the honour!) and some end up on the Chief Examiner's desk. The mechanism isn't entirely clear either but it seems to be quite close to a foolproof system, and you can also ask for a remark.
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