Welcome to your ultimate guide for Paper 1 in Language and Literature for 2024! This post is designed to be your go-to for mastering Paper 1, with a focus on visual texts. We’ll introduce various text types and provide free resources to help you excel. Stay tuned as we continue to update this post with more texts and free resources.

The importance of Paper 1

Paper 1 is a significant part of the Language and Literature course, and it does give you guys a challenge to analyse completely unseen texts within a limited time frame. This Paper can be quite a task, since SL students need to tackle one text in 1 hour and 15 minutes and HL students need to analyse two texts in 2 hours and 15 minutes. This means you need to quickly familiarize yourself with the text, annotate key elements, and structure their analysis into a coherent essay that addresses the guiding question (GQ).

The texts in Paper 1 can be visual, non-literary, or a mix of both, making it a bit of a wild card. This unpredictability means you need to be flexible and ready to adapt or improvise your analysis on the go. Despite these challenges, Paper 1 is super important—it makes up 35% of your grade at both standard and higher levels. Nailing this part of the exam not only boosts your overall grade but also sharpens your analytical skills, which are useful in so many areas of life. This guide is here to help you with the tools and strategies you need to ace Paper 1, so you can confidently handle any text that comes your way.

Visual Texts for Paper 1

If you’re taking English SL, the majority of students go for visual texts! Why is that?

It’s easy to skim and scan the text. Also, everything is visually appealing, so you can easily see how different elements of the text falls into place. There are a few go-to conventions that all visual texts use, and you can find the general conventions of visual texts by keeping these in mind. For a more in-depth understanding of each visual text type, visit the posts individually for a more comprehensive understanding!