Figure out what the task wants before you write.
In Paper 1 you're writing a text, not analyzing one. That means a lot of your score is decided before you write a word. Did you read the prompt closely enough to know who you're writing to? Did you pick a text type you can actually pull off? Did you plan three ideas you can develop, instead of six you can only mention? This page helps with all three.
This is all for practice. Nothing you type or tick is saved or sent anywhere, so do the drills as many times as you want.
The shape of the paper
There are three tasks, and you pick one. Each one gives you a situation, a purpose, an audience, and a choice of text types. So your first two decisions are: which task do you have ideas for, and which text type can you keep up from start to finish?
How it is marked
There are three criteria, 30 marks in total. Language and Message are worth 12 each, and Conceptual understanding is worth 6. If you know which criterion a choice affects, you'll know where your checking time is best spent.
| Criterion | Marks | What the examiner is looking for | What earns marks here |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Language | 12 | The range and accuracy of your vocabulary and grammar, and whether the language you have chosen suits the task you were given. | Varied sentence structures, precise word choice, and control of tense. Accuracy matters a great deal, although a response that plays it safe and stays error-free will usually score lower than one that reaches for something harder and slips once or twice along the way. |
| B Message | 12 | Whether your ideas answer the task, whether they are developed rather than simply listed, and whether they are organized so that a reader can follow the line of thought. | Two or three ideas explored properly, since they will always score higher than six ideas mentioned in passing, together with cohesive devices that signal a real relationship between one idea and the next. |
| C Conceptual understanding | 6 | Whether you chose an appropriate text type and handled its conventions, and whether register, tone, context and audience are right and stay right the whole way through. | This is the criterion the text type library exists for: getting the conventions on the page, sounding like the person the task made you, and speaking to the reader the task named rather than drifting toward whoever is easiest to write to. |
Where marks usually go missing
- The text type is announced but never performed. A response headed "Blog" that reads like an essay will lose marks on criterion C however good the English underneath it is.
- The audience drifts. You begin by addressing the school board, and by the third paragraph, without ever deciding to, you are writing to your classmates instead.
- Register slips under pressure. Contractions and casual phrasing tend to work their way into a formal report somewhere in the middle, once concentration has moved on to content.
- Ideas are listed rather than developed. Every paragraph introduces something new and nothing gets explained, which is the most common weakness in timed writing and the easiest one to plan your way out of.
- The word count is ignored. Falling under the minimum is penalized, and running well over it usually means the planning stage was skipped.
- The context is dropped. When a task tells you where the text will appear, that setting is part of what is being assessed, so a speech written for an assembly should sound like something delivered in a hall rather than something read off a page.
Text type library
These are the text types you're likely to see, grouped the way the IB guide groups them. Open any one to see what it's for, who reads it, how it's put together, an annotated model, and the mistakes students make most often. All the models are about the same situation (the school library closing earlier), so you can see how one set of facts changes for a report, a speech, a news story, a poster, and a diary.
Nothing matches that search.
Reading the prompt
Before you choose a text type, you need to know four things, and the prompt tells you all four if you read it slowly. Go through these tasks one question at a time. Decide on your answer before you click, because the explanation afterward is where the learning happens.
The four questions, every time
- Context Where will this text appear? A school newsletter, an assembly hall, a website, a private inbox. The context is nearly always stated outright, and it constrains everything that follows it.
- Audience Who reads it? Not people in general, but the particular group the task names, whose age, whose relationship to you, and whose existing knowledge all change the words you can reasonably use.
- Purpose What should the reader do, think or feel afterward? Most prompts carry one dominant purpose, such as persuading or informing or reflecting, alongside a second that supports it.
- Register Formal, semi-formal or informal, decided by the audience and the context together rather than by how serious the topic happens to be.
Drills
Planning routine
Spend the first ten minutes planning, before you write a single sentence. This is the step students skip most, because ten minutes feels like forever in an exam. But the responses that skip it are the ones that run out of ideas around 400 words.
Ten minutes, six moves
- Read all three tasks before choosing (2 min) Resist committing to the first task that looks manageable, and ask of each one whether you have ideas about it and whether you can control one of the text types it offers, because you need both. Ideas without control of the form will cost you on criterion C, and control without ideas will cost you on criterion B.
- Answer the four questions (1 min) Write context, audience, purpose and register in the margin, where you can glance at them while you draft. Having them visible is what stops the drift that examiners notice in the middle third of so many responses.
- Commit to the text type and list its features (1 min) Before you plan any content, note the four or five conventions this text type has to show, whether that means a headline and byline, a sign-off, subheadings or direct address to a room. That short list becomes the checklist you work through at the end.
- Choose two or three ideas rather than six (2 min) A response of 450 to 600 words is roughly three developed body paragraphs, so choose the ideas you can explain, illustrate and tie back to your purpose, and let the rest go.
- Plan each idea in three layers (3 min) Claim, then support, then consequence: what you think, why you think it, and why your reader should care. A paragraph that carries all three layers is what criterion B means when it asks for ideas that are developed.
- Draft your opening sentence (1 min) Your first line establishes register and text type simultaneously, and because the examiner's impression forms immediately, getting that sentence onto the page before you begin the response is worth the minute it costs.
Pacing the ninety minutes
| Stage | Time | What you are doing |
|---|---|---|
| Choose and plan | 10 min | The six moves above, on the question paper or in the margin |
| Write | 65 min | Around fifteen minutes on the opening and the first body paragraph, then keep moving rather than perfecting |
| Check | 15 min | Three passes: conventions, then register, then accuracy |
Fifteen minutes of checking sounds like a lot. Once you actually use it, it's about right for three separate read-throughs. If you try to check everything at once, mistakes slip through.
The three-layer paragraph
Applied here to the claim that a school should push its start time back by an hour.
Moving the school day back by an hour would do more for academic performance than any timetable change we have made in recent years.
Layer 2 · supportAdolescent sleep cycles shift later during exactly these years, so a student who is still awake at eleven is not simply choosing to stay up but is working against their own biology when the alarm goes at six, which means the first lesson of the day is being taught to a room that is physically present and cognitively absent.
Layer 3 · consequenceOnce we accept that, the current timetable stops looking neutral, because it quietly decides that whichever subjects are scheduled first thing will always be learned less well than the ones scheduled after break, and that is a strange thing for a school to settle by accident.
- "Students are tired in the morning. Teenagers need more sleep. Starting later would help them learn better. It would also reduce lateness."
- Four ideas, none of them explained, no support and no consequence. This is the pattern that holds otherwise fluent responses in the middle bands on criterion B.
Before you hand it in
Read your response three times, looking for one thing each time. If you check conventions, meaning, and accuracy all at once, you'll miss things. Tick the boxes as you go. Nothing is saved, so they'll be empty again next time.