You know the texts. You write practice essays on a regular schedule. And your marks still sit in the middle bands. Often, the missing piece isn’t content. It’s the match between what you wrote and what the question asked for. Every exam question carries a command term, the verb that tells the examiner what kind of thinking to reward. Skim past it and you can write a well-informed answer to a question the examiner didn’t ask.
Two IB practitioners’ accounts point the same way. Students who align their thinking and structure with that verb earn marks that extra memorized content alone does not. So what is the verb actually asking you to do?
What Command Terms Tell You
A command term is a precise action word, and it shapes the answer as well as the topic. Describing something and judging it are different jobs on the page. One reports what is there. The other weighs it and commits to a verdict. Describe, explain, analyze, discuss, and evaluate are not stylistic variations of one another. A response that explains well can still fall short of what the mark scheme rewards for an evaluation.
A recent Koncepts School piece, “Teaching Command Terms Explicitly: The Hidden IB Mistake Costing Students Marks,” reports that many students misread or ignore command terms and treat them as interchangeable. The result is the wrong kind of thinking, such as explaining when the task calls for evaluating. Marks follow when your thinking and structure match the command term. A long answer to the wrong task is still the wrong answer.
Analyze Versus Evaluate in Practice
Analyze and evaluate sit close together in everyday language, which makes them easy to swap. On the page, they ask for different moves. Analyze asks how something works: which techniques are used and how they create meaning. Evaluate asks how effective or significant it is, so you weigh its impact, consider plausible alternatives, and form a judgment.
In a LinkedIn post on teaching command terms through visual texts, IBDP English teacher Rajinder Kaur describes a classroom activity built around a political cartoon. Students first analyzed it, examining symbols, composition, and contrast to explain how meaning was constructed. They then evaluated it, judging how effective that meaning was and how it might affect an audience. Kaur’s point is that even students who could define both terms struggled to perform the required thinking.
The weak spot, then, is execution, and a vocabulary list can’t fix that.
Decoding the Command Term Before You Write
The idea fits in three moves. Identify the command term, translate it into what the response must do, and plan around that translation. If the term is evaluate, the plan has to contain a judgment and the reasoning behind it. Koncepts School recommends underlining the term so it can’t fade while you draft. The 60-Second Command-Term Decode below is a timed version of those three moves. Steps 1 and 2 identify and translate, steps 3 and 4 plan, and step 5 checks that the plan holds once you start writing.
- Mark (5 seconds): underline the command term and any scope words, such as “to what extent.”
- Translate (15 seconds): write a one-sentence examiner brief that finishes “To earn marks, I must ___.”
- Choose your paragraph pattern (20 seconds): decide the one move every body paragraph will repeat.
- Handle double instructions (10 seconds): when a question has two command terms, the later one is usually the destination and the earlier one supplies the method, as in “analyze to support my evaluation.”
- Check mid-draft (10 seconds, once): after paragraph one, ask whether it would look the same without the command term. If it would, rewrite the topic sentence so it performs the move.
Here is how the blank in Step 2 fills in. Analyze: show how choices and techniques construct meaning. Evaluate: judge how effective the text is and reach a clear verdict. Compare: weigh key similarities and differences to make one focused point. Discuss: test more than one plausible position, then say where you land.
Step 3 gives each paragraph one repeating job. Analyze paragraphs move from a feature to its effect or meaning, then to why it matters. Evaluate paragraphs open with a claim about value or impact, add evidence and reasoning, and close with a mini-verdict. Compare paragraphs open with a point of comparison, bring in evidence from Text A and Text B, and finish with what the contrast reveals. Each pattern is just the command term turned into a paragraph shape, and it only becomes a habit when you rehearse it on real questions.
Making the Habit Stick Across Texts and Sessions
In my view, command-term literacy builds by repeating the same decoding move across many questions, which fits Koncepts School’s call for explicit, repeated teaching. The harder part is keeping it up under the clock. When time is short, defaults win, so the practice needs exam-style timing.
The prompts come from IB English past-paper resources, which supply real exam-style questions. Run the decode on each one. Then reuse the same question for the exercise Koncepts School recommends: rewrite it with a different command term. The topic stays the same, but the reasoning the question demands changes, and seeing that shift on a text you already know is the point.
After each attempt, spend five minutes on a Past-Paper Command-Term Drill Log.
- Log: write the command term, rate your match 0–2 (0 drifted, 1 mixed, 2 consistent), and copy one sentence proving the move.
- Review: after every three practices, scan your last three ratings and name your most common miss, such as analyzing when you were asked to evaluate.
- Any 0: next session, run a decode-only drill. Write just the examiner brief and paragraph pattern for six prompts, with no full essay.
- Mostly 1s: rewrite one past-paper question with a different command term and outline both versions.
- Mostly 2s: keep timed practice and add the mid-draft check.
Those ratings answer one question: are you matching the command term, or just writing more?
Answer the Question That Was Asked
Go back to the student from the start, the one who knows the texts, writes often, and still lands in the middle bands. That student may not need more reading or more practice essays. The two practitioner accounts describe marks lost to misread or underused command terms, and the repair they describe is small. It happens before the first paragraph, not during the third.
Underline the verb. Finish the sentence “To earn marks, I must ___.” Then start writing.