English HL personal essays?

lizzmurph

In the mock I did a personal essay on creativity and thought it went really well, but ended up only getting 55% on paper 1 does anyone have any tips for writing a better personal essay?

aleatorio

lizzmurph wrote: »

In the mock I did a personal essay on creativity and thought it went really well, but ended up only getting 55% on paper 1 does anyone have any tips for writing a better personal essay?

I did a personal essay in the mocks too, and did terribly, so I'm just going to avoid them tomorrow it's very hard to draw a line between a personal essay and just rambling :P

lizzmurph

aleatorio wrote: »

I did a personal essay in the mocks too, and did terribly, so I'm just going to avoid them tomorrow it's very hard to draw a line between a personal essay and just rambling :P

But I can't write short stories and fid it difficult to do articles and stuff so I feel it's my only option anyways I guess I'll just see why titles come up and hope for the best!!

TheBegotten

In English it's fairly hard to figure out what you've lost the marks on, but they tend to have a lot of sneaky ways to mark you down. The composing part of the exam is marked like this:

- Purpose: relevance, focus, originality, freshness, clear aim, understanding of genre -- 30%
- Delivery: continuity of argument, sequencing, management of ideas, choice of reference, use of examples, engagement with texts, control of register and shape, creative modelling -- 30%
- Language: vocabulary, syntax, sentence patterns, paragraph structure, punctuation appropriate to the register, use of lively interesting phrasing, energy, style, fluency appropriate to the task -- 30%
- Mechanics: 10%

Now, discounting mechanics that leaves 90 marks for purpose, delivery and language. However, to the untrained eye, delivery and purpose seem much the same thing: focus would appear to be the continuity of argument, clear aim is management of ideas, etc. As a result, although they are two seperate catagories, your purpose marks are going to be roughly the same as your delivery marks. This means that if you ramble, or lose sight of what was asked of you, you're losing marks twice.

On top of this is the subjective nature of the subject. It is easy to write about something which you have a passionate interest in, but this presents a risk of alienating or even offending the examiner. Ideally this should not e a concern and the examiner should mark you based on the quality of your work, but a subconcious bias can creep in and cost you a few marks. I'm not saying that you shouldn't offer up opinions at all; quite the opposite, many forms of writing require a concrete and persuasive argument - just bear in mind that the reader may not agree with you and you must treat these differing opinions with respect.

TL;DR - Keep your mind on the question, check yourself if you begin to ramble, and consider the examiner while you are writing. Good luck to us all!

EoghanIRL

I will always do persuasion / informative writing . E.g speech . I'm good at debating and can always come up with lots of points to discuss.
Do what you are best at.

AmbiiSmiley

I always do a personal essay and get A's and B's.
What I do is I keep referring back to the essay title. This means after every paragraph go back and re-read the title just to make sure you stay on track.

LiverpoolLad95

Stupid Question, what would you do in a Personal Essay? Are you the central character? I always do a short story/ descriptive essay. Also, in a descriptive essay, the more descriptive you are the better, right?

leavingcerta

Hey does anyone have a link for the layout of a newspaper article? Or could anyone explain it please :-)

bb1234567

Guys do we make a title for our essay? Like if it says 'write a short story about a character who demonstrates courage' do we make a title or just write the number of the question and the quote they give?

AmbiiSmiley

LiverpoolLad95 wrote: »

Stupid Question, what would you do in a Personal Essay? Are you the central character? I always do a short story/ descriptive essay. Also, in a descriptive essay, the more descriptive you are the better, right?

I never do the short story because its almost impossible to come up with characters and a good plot in the short time frame...it takes most authors years to come up with a story that will sell so the short story is very dodgy...

For personal essays, lets just say the question is from 2007 and it says "Write a personal essay on the idealism and passions of youth" You would just talk about all of the passions that young people have today then talk about your own personal experiences with that topic. Its not like a short story where you are the central character, you are talking about how the title relates to you.

bb1234567

AmbiiSmiley wrote: »

I never do the short story because its almost impossible to come up with characters and a good plot in the short time frame...it takes most authors years to come up with a story that will sell so the short story is very dodgy...

For personal essays, lets just say the question is from 2007 and it says "Write a personal essay on the idealism and passions of youth" You would just talk about all of the passions that young people have today then talk about your own personal experiences with that topic. Its not like a short story where you are the central character, you are talking about how the title relates to you.

Theyre not looking for anything spectacular out of the plot! I did a short story about some soldier in a war in mine for the mock. Plot as generic as anything. Still got 72 out of 100 and im not even very good at english