For Higher Level students, the fourth assessment component is the Higher Level essay. Former Literature students will know this as similar in concept to the Written Assignment and the World Literature essay before that: nothing more than a slightly longer piece of analysis. The trick, as always, is choosing the right topic.
The Agonies of Choice
You may have noticed through your IB Diploma courses, perhaps even in your Secondary education before that, that the great educational buzz-word of our era is that of student "choice". However, as any teacher of the IB Diploma would be able to tell you, and as you will find out in your forthcoming Internal Assessments, choice is not the great liberator but instead the greatest challenge you will face. 'Just give me a question and I'll answer it,' you'll find yourselves screaming into your pillow during yet another sleepless night. How do you choose a suitable topic for a 1500 word essay?
The answer is, naturally, with difficulty. You can and should expect a degree of support from your teacher, but even that relationship is fraught with challenges. A teacher can help but cannot give you the topic or question. If they model an example, you cannot use that. They can give you feedback on your choice - preferably before you start writing the essay - but it is ultimately for you to decide. In my experience, what is hardest is when students are adamant their first idea is a good one, but all I want to say is, 'Give it time. Think again. Come up with more ideas. Very soon you'll see for yourself why this is a bad idea!' It is always this way with internal assessments or practice examination essays written in term 1 of the course. Good students just cannot understand why it isn't a Level 7 (or even a 6) and argue vociferously for it to be raised. A year later they always say that they can't believe how bad they used to be!
From General to Specific
But I digress. Let's explore a real process that moves from general idea, to research, to identifying texts through which the thesis could be explored, to essay outline.
Imagine you enjoyed looking at advertising in the "language" part of the course - perhaps even how the traditional print media was and is, to some extent, just another arm of the advertising industry - and you wanted to expore how social change can be charted through its advertising. The nature of the family, gender roles and responsibilities, and more socially liberal attitudes to sex and nudity can all be seen in modern advertising compared to, for example, that of the 1950's. You would need to identify texts through which you can test your theory, just like in the Natural Sciences wherein an experiment is designed to test a hypothesis. After all, a large chunk of this essay is going to need to be direct analysis of a primary source to avoid it being too abstract and generalised. You would need some sort of academic or theoretical context to the argument, and then some key piece of additional information to make the conclusion hard-hitting and the research worthy of study.
Here's what one student came up with:
Now you try the same:
How much of HL Essay - Choosing a Topic have you understood?
Twitter 
Facebook 
LinkedIn