How many words was your EE?

History, 4014 words - damn I hope it will not be a problem... with appendices and the rest about 6000... The worst scenario, the examiner will not read those 14 words

History, 4014 words - damn I hope it will not be a problem... with appendices and the rest about 6000... The worst scenario, the examiner will not read those 14 words

Can you do that? On children's books, I mean. I was told by an English A1 teacher (and extended essay supervisor) that you weren't allowed to do it on children's fiction - or that the IB didn't like it, at any rate. Maybe she was just being overzealous though...

As for going over 4000 words; AFAIK, you have a 10% leeway, so you can go to about 4400 words before you are penalized (i.e. lose marks for presentation/structure whatever) but the examiner isn't strictly required to read any further than 4000 words. Although, as you said, they're unlikely to count and would probably read it all anyway. My supervisor told me she had a student who went over one year but neither of them could work out what to take out so she wrote a note saying she knew it was too long but could the examiner please read it all. The student got an A or a B, so...

And footnotes/appendices/legends (on pictures)/tables/graphs etc. don't count in the word count. Luckily for me, or my essay would be twice as long

I dont see why you cant do children's lit. It's literature and it's a genre that's never looked at in the syllabus. My supervisor actually said to choose HP and C. S. Lewis over Jane Austen (my initial topic) because HP and CSL are more fresh topics as opposed to the boring old classics like Austen and Dickens. You want to write something interesting and innovative for your EE and not that many people do children's lit so my supervisor said it was a good choice because it would be new and more motivating to read.

Yeah, for everything you get a 10% leeway but I dont think you should ever report the wordcount to be over hte limit since you'll be playing with fire...My Geography fieldwork report is supposed to be 1500 words (I dont see how anyone could say anything remotely sufficient in that small boundary) and it's actually 1623 (A LOT of cutting, my first draft was 3750) so I just said in the word count 1499. It's a lot of small paragraphs so I dont think it showed that it was over the limit.

um, i think the reason it's not looked at in the syllabus is because it's not allowed. Don't get me wrong, I think it's stupid, and I agree, children's literature is as much litterature as anything else, and a lot more interesting that some of the stuff we've done. For future reference though, I think your supervisor might need to check what they're talking about...They'll mark your extended essay and shouldn't down grade you for your supervisor's mistake (I'm still working on the assumption that my english teacher, who has been around for a while, is correct in saying it's not allowed - or at least not encouraged), but for future reference...