How should I structure an essay?

For Philosophy, there is no specific set essay style and the IB recognises this somewhat. The general jist of philosophy is that unlike other subjects it lets you be kind of personal - sometimes you can even use 'I'! The way you approach a philosophy essay really depends on the command words (like 'evaluate' or 'describe'.) However, the general idea is to have your structure be clear and logical. What this actually means is that someone can point to any part of your essay and tell you why you need that to get to your conclusion. Generally speaking, an Introduction serves to describe how your essay is going to be structured and the topics you will be adressing and a Conclusion brings together the topics and structure and describes each individual conclusion you made on the topics. This is a really abstract way to put it but generally I find that if I stick to this idea then my essay will be much easier to write. To give an example of how I would interpret an 'evaluate'-type question with the following structure: Intro, What's Good 1, What bad about 'What's Good 1', What's Bad 1, "Why what's Bad can be justified/explained away" 1, What's Good 2 + (what's bad about...), What's Bad 2 + (why what...), evaluate which 'side' is more convincing, conclusion. As you can see here only a small but potent part of the essay is 'actually evaluating' but that's because a majority of the evaluation is actually handled by and implied by the structure hence all you have to do once you've figured out your structure is fill in the gaps.