Answering A Question

 Anyone who I've taught in the last (I dread to think how many) few years, will be aware of the BLT method of answering questions. Whilst I'm aware that there are individuals outside of my classroom who have questioned it, I've found it a useful way of structuring each paragraph which we present, in order to ensure that the examiner sees that we have covered everything required, but also to ensure that we make sure we cover everything we need to.

It's also incredibly easy to remember - but how does it work.

BLT stands for:

• Because
• Leading To
• Therefore

The idea is that by utilising these three key words in our answers as sentence starters, we are ensuring that we progress through the key areas we need to demonstrate within our response:

• Knowledge
• Analysis
• Evaluation

Remember also that whatever question we're answering, we must ensure that we use context - which I discussed in THIS post.

So - let's break the BLT approach down so we're clear - please note that this applies to paragraphs at both IB and IGCSE level, we just need to adjust the level of detail we're including depending on our level.

Let's consider the following case study:

Then the question:

• Analyse the advantages and disadvantages to Victoria and Alexandra of operating as a partnership.   [6]

Clearly this question is asking us to consider both sides of the discussion, so we need to ensure that we provide a balanced answer, and we must ensure we include context. Then we're going to use BLT to structure our response appropriately in order to maximise our marks.

In order to do so, first we're going to make a point which makes clear whether we're discussing an advantage or a disadvantage, ensuring that we include context:

One key advantage to Victoria and Alexandra of operating Regent Couture as a partnership is that they have been able to pool their savings together, in order to raise the money to start the business.

Now that we've made our point, we can continue on to our BLT approach as follows:

This is an advantage because Victoria and Alexandra will now share the responsibility of running Regent Couture together, since they are both equal partners in the luxury clothing business. This will lead to them being able to share ideas with one another, as well as the workload of running the business, particularly when operating the two locations of Manchester and Bond Street, to ensure that the business runs smoothly and continues to cater to their loyal clientele. Therefore, since they are sharing their  ideas and balancing their workload, they are more likely to have the time to ensure that they are generating new ideas for clothing and to focus on growing the brand further, to attract new customers to use the business, thus helping the business continue to grow.

Nice! I hear you say - but we're not done yet - whilst the BLT structure provides a good structure for an argument, we must always ensure that we finish our BLT paragraph with a however point, just for balance - something like the following:

However, given that Victoria and Alexandra are unable to exploit economies of scale, due to their business still being small, the increased costs may make it difficult for them to be able to appoint staff to help them run the business, which may increase their workload - thus rendering the advantage obsolete since they will be so focused on the day-to-day operations of the Regent Couture.

Now - I've purposely written the above making each element it's own distinct section, hence the different colours. In practice, and at IGCSE Level, you may not go in to this level of detail - depending on the question.

Moving on to the second paragraph, you would simply repeat the above process, ensuring that your disadvantage is not just a mirror of the points you've made above (e.g. a disadvantage would be that they have increased cots and no economies of scale) but is developed in the same way.

So it really is as simple as that - BLT, plus a However, and you've got your paragraph sorted!

Why not give the second paragraph a go and write it in the comments below?