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English HL Written Assignment Guide


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So hey guys, I'm supposed to write my written assignment for English, but I don't know where to start and I'm struggling. It gets send to the IBO right? What exactly are they looking for in the assignment? The assessment rubric isn't really that helpful. What kind of content should I provide in order to get a good grade? To what extent does it have to be related to the supervised writing? I'm kind of nervous cause English is my weak subject and the written assignment is worth like 20% of your overall grade. BTW if it helps, I chose the play Medea by Euripides and my prompt is "How does Euripides characterize Medea to be a believable character to Jason through her interactions with him"? This is probably not my final prompt cause I don't like how it sounds and you can even phrase it differently after you're done with the assignment but it's what my written assignment is going to be based on. Thanks

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So hey guys, I'm supposed to write my written assignment for English, but I don't know where to start and I'm struggling. It gets send to the IBO right? What exactly are they looking for in the assignment? The assessment rubric isn't really that helpful. What kind of content should I provide in order to get a good grade? To what extent does it have to be related to the supervised writing? I'm kind of nervous cause English is my weak subject and the written assignment is worth like 20% of your overall grade. BTW if it helps, I chose the play Medea by Euripides and my prompt is "How does Euripides characterize Medea to be a believable character to Jason through her interactions with him"? This is probably not my final prompt cause I don't like how it sounds and you can even phrase it differently after you're done with the assignment but it's what my written assignment is going to be based on. Thanks

I don't know if you came up with your question or not (technically you're marked on it, so you ought to have come up with it yourself!) but it's not really the kind of thing I would personally like to write about, it sounds quite tedious. If you're not happy with it, change it now because otherwise your whole essay will be wrong. You're here to answer the question you set yourself, so there's no point in answering it and THEN changing the question! Because then your essay will be at odds with your question and you lose marks.

Anyway, where to start - I suggest with the question "How does Euripides characterize Medea to be a believable character to Jason through her interactions with him?"

It really is very simple. What does Euripides do to make Medea seem believable? Pick up the book, read it and think about it. Once you've found some examples you can look at those examples and see if there's anything which unites them - e.g. the way Medea speaks, the setting she's in, whatever. Then voila, you have a paragraph on how she speaks, a paragraph on how the setting helps.... etc.! Start from the bottom up and the essay builds itself. Once the content is sorted, write an introduction which fits with what you've found to talk about, then write the main essay and then you can conclude.

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Thanks for the suggestion, but do you think my question is too narrow? When I saw examples, I noticed that the essay title were very short and broad. Like the role of *some character* as a role model in *some book* or the contrast between *something* and *another thing* in *some book*. They weren't even questions. Mine is too long, and kind of narrow and a question. Should that be a concern?

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Only if you run out of things to write about before hitting the maximum end of the word limit. Otherwise, no I wouldn't worry. The more specific your question then in some ways the more thorough your analysis. Provided it isn't too short a question and so not appropriate for a however-many-thousand word essay, really. Appropriately narrow is generally a good thing, because it means you'll go into real detail and not leave anything out.

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