Paper 1: The Guided Textual Analysis Explained

Paper 1 asks you to do one thing well: produce a focused, analytical response to a text you have never seen before. For IB English A: Language and Literature, the passages are always non-literary. That means advertisements, opinion columns, blog posts, infographics, speeches, cartoons, travel writing, letters, and similar text types drawn from the real world. You are not asked to recognize a famous author or recall a set text. You are asked to read closely and explain how the writer shapes meaning for a reader.

What actually appears on the paper

Each passage arrives with a short guiding question printed beneath it. The guiding question is not decoration; it names an angle of analysis and points you toward the heart of the text. A typical guiding question might read, "How does the writer us