Welcome back, friends!

Last week I wrote about how we’ve inflated the word “extraordinary” until it means almost nothing.

This week, I’ve been thinking about the opposite problem: words that have become too small, too casual, to carry the weight we actually need them to hold. Take “switch.”

We use it dozens of times a day—switching tabs, switching lanes, switching topics in conversation—and the word has become so frictionless that we barely notice it. But etymologically, “switch” comes from a Low German word meaning “a thin flexible shoot or twig,” something used for striking or redirecting.

It was always about force. About deflection. About changing direction through decisive action, often violent action.

Somewhere along the way, we turned it into something you do with your thumb on a screen. What fascinates me about English is how certain words retain their original violence just beneath the surface, waiting to be reactivated. A switch isn’t passive. It’s a moment when you impose your will on a system. It’s the instant when inertia ends and something new—sometimes irreversible—begins.

This week’s essay prompt: “Write a story with the title, ‘The switch’.“; it’s question 5 from the May 2025 Paper 2 series in Variant 2 – we’ll continue next week with Variant 3!

Here’s what makes this prompt brilliantly constrained: it gives you almost nothing. Two words. No context. No genre hints. Most students will panic at this openness and default to the most literal interpretation—someone flipping a light switch, or a magical switcheroo between bodies. But the strongest narratives understand that when a prompt gives you a title this spare, that title isn’t just a label—it’s a structural anchor. Everything in your story must orbit that word. The challenge is deciding which kind of switch you’re writing about: Is it a physical object (button, lever, circuit breaker)? A moment of decision (moral switch, psychological turning point)? A metaphorical exchange (role reversal, identity swap)? The best responses do both at once—they use a concrete, literal switch to embody an abstract transformation. This tests whether you understand that good narrative titles aren’t decorative; they’re compression devices. They tell you what your story is really about. So the question becomes: can you write a story where flipping an alarm switch is simultaneously an act of rescue, an act of defiance, and a moment when someone stops being a passive observer and becomes the person who changes what happens next? Can you make one physical gesture carry the full weight of consequence, choice, and transformation? That’s not just storytelling—that’s understanding how titles create meaning through resonance between the literal and the figurative.

You’ll find the essay here!

The full essay is available for our premium members and is also marked and graded. By reading it, you can get a clear picture of what works, as always. If you haven’t signed up already, then make sure to sign up over here!

Thank you all, and look forward to seeing you in the next one!

Welcome back, friends!

We call everything extraordinary now—a sandwich, a sunset, a Tuesday afternoon.

The word comes from Latin: extra ordinem, “outside the usual order.”

It was meant to describe things that break the pattern, that violate what we expect from the world. But we’ve inflated it until it’s lost all pressure. Maybe that’s because we’re afraid of ordinariness, or maybe it’s because English doesn’t give us a good middle ground between “boring” and “life-changing.” We don’t have words for the subtle gradations of remarkableness—the moment that’s interesting but not stunning, memorable but not transformative. So we reach for “extraordinary” and flatten its meaning. Here’s what I find fascinating: when something truly extraordinary happens, we often go quiet. We strip away the adjectives. We say, “I can’t describe it.” The real extraordinary resists language altogether.

This week’s essay prompt: “Write a story which involves an extraordinary journey.”; it’s question 4 from the May 2025 Paper 2 series.

This prompt sets a trap that most students will walk straight into: they’ll confuse “extraordinary” with “exotic.” They’ll write about plane crashes in jungles, time travel, or epic quests through fantasy landscapes. But here’s the challenge buried in that single word “involves”—it doesn’t say the journey is extraordinary; it says the story involves one. That’s a crucial distinction. The strongest responses understand that an extraordinary journey isn’t necessarily about spectacular events; it’s about a journey that transforms the person taking it. This is where narrative writing diverges from adventure storytelling: you’re not just chronicling what happens, you’re revealing why it matters. Can you write about a bus ride up a mountain and make it feel extraordinary because of what the narrator is carrying—guilt, fear, unfinished business? Can you create a journey where the external obstacles (fog, landslide, broken bridge) mirror the internal ones (shame, courage, the decision to return home)? The prompt tests whether you understand that “extraordinary” is a judgment made in retrospect, not a quality inherent to the events themselves. A journey becomes extraordinary when the person who took it is no longer the same person who began it—and your job as the writer is to show us that transformation through action, choice, and consequence, not through telling us it was extraordinary.

You’ll find the essay here!

The full essay is available for our premium members. If you haven’t signed up already, then make sure to sign up over here!

Thank you all, and look forward to seeing you in the next one!