Individual Oral Commentary

So it's that time of the year again. The Individual Oral Commentary time, or rather IOCs. It is obvious the week the IOCs struck, as you see sleepy-eyed but strangely hyped up year 13s sprouting random quotes from a myriad of romantic poets, Shakespeare, martin Luther King... etc. You get the idea.

So here's a run-through:

15% of your IB Diploma English 1A Language Score; 15 minutes in length

Requirements and Time: You will be given 20 minutes of uninterrupted preparation time with the passage. Your total Individual Oral Commentary should be 15 minutes in length. You will need to conclude your commentary at 12-13 minutes to provide time for my follow-up questionsto make sure your response is as complete as possible.

Refer also to the Starred Post: How to Develop a Commentary - lots more advice on IOCs and oral commentaries; especially recommended is the area about how to prepare for them.

Where to Start: What is your introductory paragraph of your IOC going to include? What is your hook? Your one to two sentence thesis? Your topic sentences? The simple answer to these inquiries is, “Who cares”? These are not the essential questionsthat we should be asking ourselves as we create an individual oral commentary; instead, they should be reserved for when we sit down at the computer to write and revise a thoughtful, well-developed essay. With an IOC, we do not have that kind of luxury (if we can associate essay writing with luxuriousness) due to the demanding time constraints: twenty minutes to prepare a commentary on one important passage from our IOC texts. So writing paragraphs is out the question, unless you are looking for a quick and easy way to waste twenty minutes.But you may ask, “Does it need focus”? Well, of course it does, since one of the categories on our rubric is “Presentation,” however the most important aspect of this category is not a well-written thesis statement, but instead clear focus and persuasiveness. In short a structured analysis of the poem to convey what you interpret/take from it. Is your argument unconvincing, or is it persuasive? Is it vague or focused? Fortunately, this IB assessment also creates natural focus since you only get about forty lines from the text. Therefore, what we need to do is get out our proverbial magnifying glasses and identify what makes this passage work, what the author,narrator, speaker or speakers are trying to do in this passage, and what proof we canuse to support these ideas.