IB English Lit HL common mistakes
IB English Lit HL · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
In Paper 1, the candidate summarises what the unseen passage 'is about' - paraphrasing its content scene by scene - and only gestures at how language, form and structure produce meaning.
Under timed conditions, comprehension feels like the safest first move, and many candidates have been trained to 'show they understood the text' rather than to analyse the construction of meaning. They treat the passage as information to be reported instead of a crafted artefact to be dismantled.
What to do instead
Before writing, annotate the passage for three or four specific formal features (diction, syntax, imagery, voice, structural turning points) and draft a one-sentence thesis about how those features shape the reader's response. Then build each body paragraph around a technique plus a short embedded quotation plus an interpretation of effect, keeping plot summary to a single orienting clause per paragraph. Practise by rewriting a summary sentence as an analytical claim: 'The poem describes a funeral' becomes 'The poem's falling rhythms and repeated monosyllables make the funeral feel stalled, so that grief is figured as paralysis rather than loss.'
In the comparative essay, the candidate writes two separate mini-essays on the two works, joined by a transitional sentence such as 'Similarly, in the other text...', so comparison happens only at the level of topic rather than of argument.
It is cognitively easier to exhaust one text and then move to the next, and candidates often believe that mentioning both works in one response satisfies the comparative requirement. They may also lack a comparative thesis, so there is no organising idea to hold the works in tension.
What to do instead
Write the thesis so it makes a claim that can only be true of the pair - for example, that both works use unreliable narration but to opposite ends, one to expose social hypocrisy and the other to protect a private grief. Then structure paragraphs by point of comparison rather than by text: each paragraph should discuss both works and end by stating what the difference reveals. A quick self-check is to ask of every paragraph, 'Could this paragraph survive if one of the two works were removed?' If yes, it is not yet comparative.
The candidate treats context as biographical anecdote or historical trivia appended to a paragraph ('the author's father died when he was young, which explains the sadness'), rather than as a lens that changes how the text means.
Context is easy to research and easy to display, and candidates confuse the presence of contextual information with the analysis of it. They also absorb the habit of 'adding background' from introductory material without learning to integrate it into interpretation.
What to do instead
Adopt the rule that context must do analytical work: every contextual reference should be followed by 'which means that...' or 'which allows the text to...'. Prefer precise, relevant framing - the publication conditions, the genre conventions of the period, the prevailing ideology the text is answering - over biography. Revise any contextual sentence that could be deleted without weakening the interpretation; if it can, cut it or convert it into an interpretive claim.
In the individual oral, the candidate spends the first minutes describing the works and their plots, then names a global issue only in passing, so the ten minutes contain little sustained analysis of how the issue is constructed in the extracts.
Nerves push candidates toward safe descriptive territory, and the global issue is often chosen late, from a list, without being genuinely interesting to the candidate. Without a sharply phrased issue, the extracts have nothing to be evidence for.
What to do instead
Phrase the global issue as a precise, contestable claim rather than a broad theme - not 'gender' but 'how domestic space is used to police women's speech' - and write it at the top of the planning page. Allocate roughly equal time to each work and rehearse with a timer so that description is capped at a sentence per work. For each extract, prepare three or four moments where a specific formal choice (image, register, structural cut) can be shown to construct the issue, and rehearse the transitions that carry the comparison between works.
The candidate chooses a global issue that is too broad or too narrow to sustain comparison, or one that one of the two works can only illustrate superficially, so the oral becomes unbalanced.
Candidates often pick an issue first and then try to force the works onto it, or pick an issue that fits one text perfectly and treat the second as an afterthought. The issue's scope is rarely tested in advance against both extracts.
What to do instead
Test the candidate issue against three criteria before committing: it must be genuinely present and formally significant in both works; it must be specific enough to generate arguable claims; and it must be broad enough to allow more than one interpretation. Draft a one-sentence statement of the issue for each work separately, then a combined sentence. If the combined sentence requires hedging or the word 'also', the issue is probably mismatched and should be re-scoped.
The HL Essay poses a question that invites plot retelling or authorial intention ('What happens in the novel and why did the author write it?') rather than an inquiry into how meaning is made, and the essay then drifts into a book report.
The freedom of the extended essay is unfamiliar, and candidates default to broad, safe topics. They also inherit the intentional fallacy from classroom discussion, assuming that recovering the author's message is the goal of criticism.
What to do instead
Frame the line of inquiry around construction and effect: 'How does the novel's shifting narrative perspective shape the reader's sympathy for the protagonist?' rather than 'What is the novel about?' Test the question by asking whether it could be answered without close reading; if it could, it is too descriptive. Keep a working thesis in view and check each paragraph against it, and treat authorial biography as evidence only where the text itself invites it.
The candidate quotes generously but analyses only the quoted words' literal content, never attending to connotation, sound, syntax, register or the positioning of the quotation within the work's structure.
Candidates are rewarded early for finding the 'right' quotation and assume that selection is the analytical act. They may also lack a vocabulary for describing language, so they fall back on naming a device and moving on.
What to do instead
Adopt a fixed drill: for each quotation, write one sentence on what it says, one on how its language works (word choice, rhythm, sentence shape, punctuation), and one on what that does to the reader or to the surrounding text. Keep quotations short enough to examine word by word - three to eight words is often enough. Build a personal lexicon of analytical verbs (modulates, undercuts, compresses, withholds, frames) to replace 'shows' and 'highlights'.
The candidate asserts that a text 'makes the reader feel' something without identifying the mechanism, or claims that an interpretation is correct because it is what the text 'obviously' means, closing down alternative readings.
Interpretive confidence is often performed rather than argued, and candidates may believe that literary analysis requires a single right answer. The result is assertion in place of evidence and an unwillingness to acknowledge ambiguity.
What to do instead
Require a mechanism for every claim about effect: name the formal feature that produces it and the specific response it invites. Where a passage is genuinely ambiguous, say so and argue for the reading the text most supports, acknowledging what a different reading would emphasise. Phrases such as 'the syntax forces the reader to...' should always be completable with a 'because'.
The candidate compares works only at the level of theme - 'both texts explore love and loss' - and never examines differences of genre, form, period or medium, so the comparison stays abstract.
Thematic comparison is the easiest to generate and the most frequently modelled, and candidates may not have been taught to think about how a play's staging, a novel's narrative architecture and a poem's compression produce meaning differently.
What to do instead
For each pair of works, write a short 'form sheet': genre conventions, narrative situation, medium-specific resources (staging, page, line, voice), and the period's assumptions about each. Then build comparison around how those formal differences shape the shared theme. A useful prompt is 'What can this work do that the other cannot, and what does it do with that advantage?'
In Paper 1, the candidate ignores the guiding question or the genre of the unseen text, applying a generic poetry or prose template regardless of whether the extract is a speech, a travel narrative, a dramatic monologue or a piece of polemic.
Templates feel efficient under exam pressure, and candidates may not have practised identifying the conventions of unfamiliar non-fiction or dramatic forms. The guiding question is sometimes skimmed rather than used as a structuring tool.
What to do instead
Spend the first three minutes identifying the text type, its likely occasion and audience, and the specific demand of the guiding question, then choose two or three conventions of that text type that the analysis will address. If the guiding question asks about, say, the presentation of a place, make place the spine of the essay rather than a topic among many. Practise with short extracts across a range of non-fiction and dramatic forms so that the conventions become recognisable rather than generic.