Commentary Paper 1 Intro and Conclusion

[BJD]

I just read the English subject report for May 2012 and one of the advice that the report gave was that candidates should not be encouraged to "write a template i.e where the introduction to the commentary briefly summarises the plot of the extract/poem and then outlines the range of literary features that which will be employed in the analysis". Our teacher had advised us to do exactly that. We have been penalised by doing any different. So my question really is what should be included in an introduction to a commentary and what should be included in the conclusion; I noticed they also mentioned 'thesis statements' for the introduction and I am wondering what that is and how I can employ that in my paper!

Good Luck May 2013!

[Aditya Chawla]

There's no definitive outline to the introduction, but you should include the following:

-A sentence or two about the subject of the extract.

-How the author develops this subject.

-Major literary devices (1 or 2).

[Babydolleyes]

Wow this is exactly what I read yesterday too, and I have been panicking since. I honestly don't know what to do now. What should an introduction include other than a thesis??? Wow I wish the IB had SUGGESTED something useful too instead of only saying what not to do in terms of the introduction and conclusion..

[agirl3173]

Could you post the subject report! I've been looking and can't find it.

[alefal]

Could you post the subject report! I've been looking and can't find it.

As far as I know, we are not allowed to post the subject reports here for copyright reasons. However, I was able to find all May 2012 subject reports by a simple Google search. Search for something like "ib subject reports 2012" and you should get a few pages that have them all.

[Yap]

Okay guys!

I'm one of those guys having been informed with advice in line with the feedback

What you are supposed to do is to, not summarize, but to conclude in the conclusion. You are supposed to take your main arguments from the body(ies) and do something with it to conclude. To illustrade, lets use mathematics

If each paragraph is a number, lets say:

3

5

6

In the conclusion, you add these together 3+5+6=14.

And 14 is your conclusion. Then you discuss the significance of 14. Sort of. 14 is your final product, not 3,5 and 6 stated each after themselves.

You see what I mean? You have to come up with something new in the conclusion. Similair how (at least I was informed to write my ToK-Essay) that you reach the final thesis, the one thesis that answers your question (Can be quite hard in this subject as they can be endless questions, but I hope you get the idea).

Edited May 1, 2013 by Yap

[MainRostand]

I dont know if this is the correct thing to do, but even if my school doesnt have anything like Pre-IB for the high school years yet, our literature teacher has been encouraging us to write commentaries since, like, EVER!

She gave us a pretty simple structure (at least this works for spanish literature a1, I think) where the introduction is just what it suggests: An introduction. It gives basic information about the text you are going to comment, like the genre (if you are able to indentify it), if it's narrative, what type of text is it, who is the author, when it was written (if I'm not mistaken these are included at the bottom of the texts?) where it was written, etc. (If you get lucky, even extremely lucky I might say, you might know some extra information about the author of the text, which is something you might want to include [like literary current, where he/she was born, other texts written by the author, etc])

She told us that for the conclusion, we should re-state the most important things of our commentary, including the author, main themes, most important literary devices, etc. But she told us that we should avoid including new information that we havent developed in the core of the paper.

I've always thought this system is pretty good, I dont know about you guys.

Edited May 1, 2013 by RodrigoA