What are you doing for IB?

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Does anyone have any advice for the extended essay?

Posted from TSR Mobile

Get started on it early!! Even if you don't start writing straight away, make sure you find plenty of books/resources with differing opinions, scan the relevant pages and take lots of notes. Make sure you write all the information you'll need for citing as well; it makes your life so much easier later on.

In terms of choosing a topic: start with the field you want to study (so for me I wanted to do history), then choose a broad topic in that field and narrow it down towards a question. This makes it much easier to keep your question within one field and not struggle with what field it falls under.

Before you start writing, make sure that you have a vague idea of how you want to split your essay up. This makes organisation so much easier when you're writing, and helps keep you on track. You might find that you need to add/move around these sections later, that's totally normal.

With your first draft just write. If it's terrible, keep writing. If you're over the word limit, keep writing. If you suddenly change your thesis, keep writing. Get all your ideas into that essay. If it jumps around, that's okay, you can make it smoother in your next draft.

Cite as you go! I have a friend who left footnotes until the end of his first draft and it was miserable to go back and footnote everything.

Once you finish your first draft, take a break. Your brain will more than likely be fried. I had planned to get my whole essay done by the end of June because I was going away for all of July without my laptop, but my mentor told me I would be mental to do that because my brain needed a break. It's been way easier to start my second draft after that break.

Finally (sorry about the length), write your second draft in a separate document. That way you can always go back and see what you originally wrote, which can be really useful. Just copy and paste the first draft into a new document and edit it there.

I hope this helps!!