English Extended Essay Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

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Organization will eventually become key in the process you 39 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 39 ll set it out as a list because it 39 s easier to read in pieces quantized form, as my physics filled mind suggests , and because it 39 s easier to find the place you 39 re at for reference. 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 39 t recommend it. You are best off going, i think, for a little studied and recent novel that won 39 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. 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. Drama and poetry are interesting in this sense because you can achieve quite a bit of comparative depth and you won 39 t necessarily be unable to look at the texts involved when you 39 re done novels are probably harder to deal with, if ultimately more rewarding. I have an odd phobia of highlighting or even breaking the spine of for that matter anything that 39 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 39 s fundamental. 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.

Finding Someone to Write My College Essay

Ask her also for the examiner 39 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. 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 39 re smart you 39 ll do it during the summer, if you 39 re lazy and/or otherwise preoccupied, like i was, you can get away with doing it later. You can 39 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.

Ask random people you know who are good at english this forum might be a good resource for feedback, even if it 39 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.

As i mentioned before, it 39 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 39 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 39 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 39 s handed in, in which case it 39 s much more satisfying to burn a lot of physical papers than pressing the delete button. 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.

Ib Extended Essay Film Studies

Didn 39 t come out to well ended up rewriting the entire thing from scratch 33 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 39 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 39 s a solitary process, and here past extended essays as well as the ibo 39 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 39 s not too long or awkwardly phrased. 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 39 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.

The brain is a much faster instrument than the fingers, so after a while almost magically you 39 ll find that it 39 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 40 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. The thing about freewriting is it 39 s completely customizable to your needs some people like using them, some people don 39 t, and a lot of people use them in a completely different way from me. 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. I tend not to work in my collected ee document simply because it 39 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.