Welcome back, friends!

February’s here, and I’ve been thinking about how the word “tense” does double duty in English. There’s tense as in tight, strained, pressured—the feeling in your shoulders before a difficult conversation. And there’s tense as in grammatical tense: past, present, future. What’s fascinating is how these two meanings collapse into each other during moments of high stakes. When you’re under real pressure, time becomes elastic and unreliable. A second stretches into an hour. The future condenses into a single choice that feels simultaneously inevitable and impossible. The present tense stops being a neutral narrative device and becomes the only tense that matters—because in moments of crisis, you don’t have the luxury of retrospective storytelling. You’re in it, making decisions in real-time with incomplete information and consequences that can’t be undone. Maybe that’s why writing about tension is so technically demanding: you have to make the reader feel time warping without losing narrative control.

This week’s essay prompt: “Describe a tense moment during a competition.”; it’s question 2 from Variant 2 of the May 2025 Paper 2 series.

Here’s what makes this prompt surgically precise: it doesn’t ask for “a tense story” or “describe tension”—it asks for the moment itself. That word “the” is doing enormous work. It demands specificity, a singular point of maximum pressure where something hangs in the balance. Most students will write about approaching the moment or recovering from the moment, but the strongest responses understand that the prompt is asking you to live inside the eye of the storm. Can you sustain intensity without resolution for an entire essay? Can you make a reader’s pulse quicken not through external action alone, but through the character’s internal experience of stakes, consequence, and choice? This is where narrative technique becomes crucial: you need to control pacing so tightly that every sentence either tightens the vice or reveals what the pressure is exposing about your character. The trap is writing action without stakes, or stakes without texture. The goal is to make tension feel earned—grounded in specific sensory detail, complicated by moral weight, resolved (or deliberately left unresolved) in a way that changes how we understand what was really being tested.

As always, the essay will be marked according to the IGCSE First Language English marking criteria available in the rubrics, and you will understand clearly what works and what doesn’t, and why. As always, so you can understand the logic of why what works works and get inspiration for your own writing.

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!