hi i'm andrew and i'm dave and we're the ib english guys today we're going to talk about the paper 2. it's back mr giles and we love it folks our preview for today is as follows first we're going to go over the requirements and basic attributes of the paper 2. we're then going to talk about why we love paper too uh we'll introduce to you the fabulous four which is a great strategy you can apply to break down questions and get on your pathway to success and lastly we will give you some really tangible steps for success that you can apply when you're crafting your thesis and getting ready to write perfect so let's start with just what is the paper too what is required first of all the paper two is a comparative essay you're going to be given four questions of a general nature and if you are going to apply those questions to two literary works so this is a literary task for all all courses and it's an hour and 45 minutes for both sl and hl and it's also it's uh 35 for the sl students and 25 for the hl students of course you can't use a text that you've already used for the higher level essay or individual oral so keep that in mind when you're approaching questions mr giles why do we love the paper 2 so much and we do love it the first thing is that it's all about intertextuality and this is one of our areas of exploration this is about taking two texts that are going to have a lot of really interesting differences but also finding some commonalities and talking about these two things and comparing them yeah another thing we like is we believe the paper two is in our control why would i say that mr giles it's in under our control yeah we know that the questions are somewhat unknown but we have we have these texts in front of us we can study them we can research them and we want to walk in with that expert knowledge so that we can answer the question yeah lastly folks we love the paper too because it centers around literature we really believe that literature fosters a deeper understanding of the human condition it fosters empathy and it's a chance for you to take knowledge from these works and really look at it in a real world context and answer some really tough questions about what these texts mean to us and how we can become better humans in society yeah well said we like you i love paper too we're readers and we like to respond to literature so now we're going to give you the fab four and i just want to say thanks to caroline hazel one of our colleagues she's given us some really good information on paper two and again it's really useful so we want to share some of the it's just these skills with you the first skill i want to highlight the first member of the fabulous four is answering the question your goal your job in the paper two is to respond in detail to that specific question so if you want to have a backbone of the paper too it's the question please do not start with backbones and this component okay not necessary okay the second element of the fab four is knowing and understanding the themes and details of your literary works uh you've studied these in great detail with your teacher with your peers and you want to think about what are those big global main ideas global understandings that you can attach to these one of these four questions and show that you've deeply understood the work in a nuanced and thematic way i might tell you brought in the question there too the third member of the fabulous four is knowing and understanding the style and language of the text this is about authorial choices this sometimes is a pitfall of many paper two writers because they get caught up in the text and they have to remember to talk about the author's choices in response to the question yeah folks we're always talking about authorial craft in the entire course regardless of the aspect the component stay on the authorial choices and crap the last element of the fab four mr giles is we have to compare and contrast go yeah i mean again it's a comparative paper so we need to point out similarities and differences of these two texts quite frequently we want to have a comparative thesis statement we want to try to have comparative topic sentences we also want to integrate subtle differences and similarities in our writing so again we're keeping that comparative hat on the whole time mr giles it sounds like this might be time for a worksheet of sentence stems and comparative language what do you think sounds like you got some work to do sounds like you need to make that so let's talk about the steps we want to follow when we're doing our planning the first step is just to write out the question when you write out the question you're able to really focus in on some of those details and it also will be at the top of your paper of your planning very important yeah and once you've done that folks step two is to look at that question and identify any key words and the question words that the ib is asking it's very important that you interpret and define these words in your paper to show that you've understood the question in relation to your works yeah so now this third step is where we start to do that heavy lifting and now we have to think about crafting a good comparative thesis statement that answers the question this is going to take a little bit of time but you write that out because this is going to be your argument that's going to guide your paper yeah once you've got that thesis pretty much where you want it we believe it's really crucial for you to write a rudimentary outline uh think about those body paragraphs think about the focus and the direction of your paper if you have some time and you want to consider it you might even want to write a few of the topic sentences out and really get that paper under control before you dig into that and start writing the introduction yeah and the last step is just to review your your whole plan and just think about how does this whole plan answer that question and do i do i have distinct topics in my body paragraphs do i have do i understand my plan you're not graded on your plan though andrew what so why don't you miss church you're not graded on your plan but as an examiner i know you feel the same way i really appreciate it when i see that plan it shows me that the student has taken 10 or 15 minutes and really been thoughtful and really approached the question in a systematic way typically responses without outlines mr giles i found are rambling and out of control yeah that is so true because the more you have a plan the more you just like with annotating with the paper one the more you've got that plan the more you'll have to say what do you say we dive into two sample questions and break them down and get moving here i like that let's do that so we're going to look at two questions just kind of do a little bit of the discussion about what we see the question asking us so read the first question the first question reads how is home depicted in two of the works you have studied and what is its significance mr giles dig into that question and let's talk about some of the key words and approaches okay so we're thinking about again the home is in parentheses i think that's really interesting so we're thinking about how that is depicted so we're thinking about this the significance of being home so i'm going to start to think about my own associations with home so i think about home as a place of safety of comfort and security maybe that could be reflected well mr josh sounds like you had a good home life maybe for me home reminds me of trauma suffering and pain you know so define that word through the lens of your paper and make sure you put that in the introduction so the examiner knows how you are approaching those key words yeah home can also be a physical place of course but home could also be a state of mind that is where you're getting kind of philosophical about it so we're trying to think about how can we approach that also pay attention to the word how mr giles to me that implies i really need to zero in on literary craft which is one of our main ideas that we need to focus on when reviewing further for the test the paper two question very or almost always will have a how or or or some by what means they're gonna ask you to zero in on enough about their real choices last thing is the word significance of course meaning the so what that's where you wanna tap into your thematic knowledge and thinking about the meaning of your works in relation to the message for the world today i think it's a very it's a pretty straightforward question yeah but i like it let's look at one more mr jaws what do you say sounds good you want to read this one out i'll read this one authors use the portrayal of characters who are somewhat trapped as a means to criticize society discuss the extent to which this is true all right the very first thing that jumps at me mr giles is this is a to what extent question could you talk a little bit about how to answer such a question discuss the extent to which you think this is true this again is something we'd probably want to integrate into our thesis statement to to really think about how much uh are these characters indeed trapped and how so we want to think about that yeah i'm glad you focus on the word trapped that's a word i would definitely define in the introduction of my paper so the examiner and me for that matter have a clear idea of where i want to take this paper in relationship to that word lastly are we focusing on symbols are we focusing on motifs what are we focusing on in this question we are zeroing in on the characters and thinking about the portrayal of the characters what's the word portrayal mean the way that author has presented those characters the way they have put them out into the story and linking them to ideas through their literary craft last phrase is criticize society go for it giles i think you know i would be writing about this inherently automatically but specifically being asked for that what does the student need to do here yeah they really need to think about that that when people are trapped obviously that's not a good thing right so we want to think about how that's being portrayed and then how that represents something about society this is a really good time to link back into time and space think about what that text meant for that particular context in which it was written you can go with intertextuality in the comparative aspect but don't forget about that time and space which is another area of exploration of our course really nice good good mr jaws what do you say we conclude our video to for today we hope that we've given you some approaches to succeed on the paper too we've told you what it's about now come back for that next video on why why should they come back for the next video mr giles cause we're gonna we're gonna light up an amazing paper that we think does an excellent job it has the fabulous four embedded in it and i think just looking at a good sample piece of writing will help you yeah we're gonna take that second question trapped and we're gonna explode that in a response so thanks for joining we hope this gets you off and running on the paper too come back for us in a couple days and we'll show you that complete paper thanks for watching everyone and take care