Four thousand words and an empty page. Almost everyone feels a small drop in the stomach at that point, and it’s completely normal.

Here’s what years of reading Extended Essays teaches you. The middling ones are rarely badly researched. They’re badly shaped. The notes are there and the sources are solid, but nothing holds them together, so a good idea on page three is forgotten by page nine.

Examiners aren’t looking for big vocabulary. They want to know whether you stayed in charge of one argument from the first line to the last. Structure is how you prove it.

Make the Topic Smaller Than Feels Sensible

Most students pick a topic that’s too big, and it’s the most common mistake by a distance. “The causes of the Cold War” could fill a library shelf. In 4,000 words you can only skim it, and skimming produces description.

Compare that with “how tragic isolation is built through three soliloquies in Hamlet, Acts 1, 3 and 5”. Now there’s nowhere to hide. You have to look closely, and looking closely is analysis.

Try this check. If you could write a book on your research question, shrink it. If the key evidence would fit on a single desk, you’re nearly there.

Title Page and Contents

Neither counts towards the word limit, but they’re the first thing the examiner sees. Keep the title page plain: research question, subject, category if there is one, and word count. No borders, no clip art.

Write the contents page last. If your subheadings read like a short summary of your reasoning, you’re in good shape. If they say “Background” and “More Analysis”, that’s a warning sign.

The Introduction: 350 to 450 Words

The weak introduction spends three paragraphs on background history and slips the question in at the bottom, almost apologetically. The strong one opens with a puzzle: a disagreement between scholars, a gap in the evidence, something that makes the reader want an answer.

From there, it does four jobs in order. It explains why this narrow slice matters, states the research question in a sentence of its own, outlines your method, and tells the reader how the argument will unfold. Nothing more is needed.

Before you write a single body paragraph, test that question on someone who will argue with it. The best IB diploma help often comes from the person who pokes holes in your plan, not the one who says it looks great. A flaw caught in week one costs an afternoon. Caught in week ten, it costs a half-written essay.

The Main Body: 2,800 to 3,100 Words

This is where marks are won and lost, and it’s where the summary trap waits. The fix is a rhythm every paragraph follows: make a claim, bring the evidence, judge that evidence, then tie it back to the research question.

Here’s how that looks in practice. Claim: Hamlet’s isolation deepens in Act 3. Evidence: he delivers “To be or not to be” apparently alone. Evaluation: yet Claudius and Polonius are listening, so the solitude is partly an illusion. Link: that tension suggests isolation is being constructed, not simply felt.

The third step is the one people skip. Telling the examiner what a source says is reporting. Telling them how far it can be trusted, and what it can’t explain, is where Critical Thinking marks come from.

Organise by theme, never by source. A paragraph on what Source A says, followed by one on Source B, is a book report. A paragraph on economic pressure that draws on both is an argument.

In Literature, themes tend to be techniques or character dynamics. In the sciences they’re variables and mechanisms. In the humanities they’re economic drivers, social pressures and competing interpretations. Check your subject guide too, because a History essay and a Chemistry essay don’t share conventions.

Give counter-arguments proper room. I’d go further and give them a section. Raise the strongest objection to your thesis, then explain why the thesis survives. Examiners read that as confidence, not weakness.

A Ten-Minute Test Worth Doing

Once you have a full draft, copy out the first sentence of every body paragraph and read them in order, nothing else.

They should sound like a short, logical answer to your research question. If they jump about or repeat, the problem isn’t your prose. It’s your order, and you can fix it by moving or merging paragraphs before polishing anything.

Then highlight every sentence that only describes a source. Within a sentence or two, each should be followed by your own judgement. Where it isn’t, you’ve found a summary hotspot.

Three Slips That Quietly Cost Marks

The late question. If the question only comes into focus in the conclusion, the body has been wandering. A History essay on “the fall of the Weimar Republic” that finally asks “which factor mattered most?” on page 14 is a good example. Write your one-sentence answer before drafting, and refine it as you learn.

The orphan paragraph. Picture a paragraph on a minor biographical detail that could sit anywhere in the essay. If you can move it without anyone noticing, it isn’t doing structural work. Cut it or connect it.

The cliffhanger. An objection raised in the last two paragraphs, with no space to answer it, leaves your thesis hanging. Put it mid-body, where you can respond properly.

Write for the Mark Scheme

The essay is marked out of 34 across five criteria: focus and method, knowledge and understanding, critical thinking, presentation, and engagement. Critical thinking carries 12 marks, more than any other, so that’s where your words should work hardest.

Engagement is judged through your reflections and the Reflections on Planning and Progress Form. Write short, honest notes as you go. Notes invented in the final week read like exactly that.

The Conclusion: 300 to 400 Words

Don’t restate the introduction in fresh adjectives. A conclusion is a verdict. Answer the question directly, show how your strands combine to support that answer, and admit honestly what you couldn’t cover, whether that’s a small sample, missing records or a variable you left alone.

Close with one or two questions your findings open up. And bring in no new evidence. If it matters, it belongs in the body.

Referencing and Appendices

Pick one citation style, whether APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard, and use it identically in every footnote and bibliography entry. Inconsistency is the easiest way to lose presentation marks.

Treat appendices with suspicion. Examiners needn’t read them, so anything your argument depends on belongs in the main text.

Final Thoughts

Structure isn’t glamorous. Nobody was ever moved by a well-ordered contents page. But when an examiner reaches your last page and can say, without flicking back, exactly what you argued and why, you’ve done the hard part. Everything else is polish.

So tonight, write your answer to the research question in one sentence and stick it above your desk. Every paragraph you write from now on either earns its place under that sentence or it goes.