Blog Post #6: Reflection on Practice Paper 1

Before thanksgiving break our class wrote a practice paper 1 similar to the one that we are going to have to write for our final in English class and what we will have to do for our IB exam our senior year. While I was writing my Paper 1 I thought that it was going quite well and was doing some rather good analysis that clearly expressed what my thought process was. It was going well at the beginning but once I had gotten to the end of the class period I found that I had ran out of stamina and just wanted to finish my work. This led to me quickly finishing the last paragraph and not putting very much effort into it. I did finish though and I thought that overall I did pretty well. The next class period we had we decided to take a look at what IB examiners felt was a bad examples of a paper one. This made me feel a little self conscious because I felt that mine was worse than the bad example. Then when we looked at the good example it was clear that it was leaps and bounds ahead of mine.

Once we began to peer edit I found that my largest problem was my format. O had not known that the preferred format for this assignment was a five paragraph essay. I just analyzed both of the texts in separate paragraphs then had another one comparing and contrasting them. I felt that it was able to convey my ideas properly but it was not the format that I was supposed to use. I think it may have been appropriate if I just simply added and an intro and conclusion.

What I learned fom this process was how to properly write a paper 1 and what the criteria is. I also learned that I need to focus on not having stamina in my writing so I do not get lazy towards the end.