Paper 1

What is a Paper 1 exam?

In a Paper 1 exam, you are given two mysterious, unseen texts. Each text is between 1-2 pages in length.

Task

For SL students, you're in luck! Your task is to write a guided analysis on just one of the two texts. Total marks: 20. You have 1 hour and 15 minutes.

For HL students, you're in less luck… Your task is to write two guided analysis essays–one on each of the texts. Total marks: 40. You have 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Text types

The mystery text types you'll get for Paper 1 depend on whether you're in IB English Language & Literature or IB English Literature.

For IB English Literature, Paper 1 text types belong to four neat categories (hooray!):

• Fictional prose (e.g. short stories, extracts from novels)

• Non-fiction prose (e.g. scientific articles, extracts)

• Dramatic plays

• Poems

For IB English Language and Literature, your text types could be… really… anything. Be prepared to be surprised. Typically, at least one of the text types will include some visual element like an image, photo, or cartoon. Here's the (non-exhaustive) list of Lang Lit text types:

• Magazines, blogs, articles and editorials

• Speeches, interview scripts, radio transcripts

• Instruction manuals, brochures

• Comic strips, political cartoons

• Web pages

• … and the list goes on…

What do I write in a guided analysis?

For each Paper 1 text, the IB English Gods pose a short, open-ended question.

This question is called the guiding question, and your essay must focus on answering this guiding question using analysis (we'll explain “analysis” in a second).

Examples of guiding questions:

• How does the writer characterize the protagonist's state of mind?

• How and to what effect do textual and visual elements shape meaning?

• How is narrative perspective used to create meaning and effect?

Even though you're technically allowed to choose your own focus and ignore the default guiding question, it's highly recommended that you go along with what's given… unless you really don't know how to answer it, or you're super confident in your Paper 1 skills.

Now, what are we supposed to do with the guiding question?

Guiding questions always ask you to explain how and why certain language or visual choices are used to build one or more central ideas.

And so the vague instruction "Answer the guiding question" actually translates to something very specific:

Explain how and why the writer uses specific language to build their central idea(s).

This sentence pretty much sums up not just IB English Paper 1, but the gist of analysis and IB English overall.