eBook
Poverty Safari (A Body of Work): 3 Into the Book
Darren McGarvey’s Orwell prize winning book, Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass (2017) is a challenge to classify. Part memoir, part political journalism, its author refers...
Review/revision
Higher level essay
The Higher Level Essay is a 1200-1500 word essay completed internally in your class but is externally assessed by an examiner. It is worth 20% of your final IB grade. It is a processed piece of writing...
Review/revision
Can you help me with the entire process?
The goal of this page is to support you during the entire process of writing your Higher Level Essay. The page takes the form of a step-by-step guide. It's meant to be instructive, not formulaic. In...
Review/revision
Do you have a checklist to help me out?
Below, you will find a checklist for your Higher Level Essay. Please remember that marking "yes" to each question on the checklist does not ensure a 7 on your essay! Instead, this checklist asks you...
Blog
Supporting Students with the Higher Level Essay Free
This week, I’ve finalized the Higher Level Essay pages in the “For Students” section of the site. The title of each page is written in the form of a question with the answer in the actual post itself. ...
eBook
Glasgow/Poverty Safari (Bodies of Work): 2 Connecting Photography to Writing
On an earlier page, here, we started to develop materials for the study of Darren McGarvey’s non-literary book, Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Working Class (2017). On this page,...
Blog
For Students: Higher Level Essay Free
This week, I’ve been working on the “For Students” section of the site with a specific focus on the Higher Level Essay. I’ve created the following pages for this week’s update: Higher Level Essay By...
Review/revision
Model example 1 (Szymborska Poetry)
When writing a Higher Level Essay on poetry, it's hard to determine how many poems to use. One is clearly not enough, but it would be difficult, perhaps, to write about five different poems. So what...
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Model example 3 (White Noise)
In the following HL essay, we publish the excellent work of a student who has studied Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. White Noise, many argue, is not DeLillo's best work, but it is probably the novel...
Review/revision
Model example 2 (George Monbiot)
This Higher Level Essay is based on the essays of George Monbiot. A useful task is to first read the essay itself before considering the essay (again) with a teacher's comments attached. One thing teachers...