Welcome back, friends!

Last week I wrote about how English softens the language around labor—how we use euphemisms to look away from difficult work.

This week, I’ve been thinking about the opposite linguistic phenomenon: how English makes emotional intimacy sound transactional.

We “make” friends the way we “make” dinner or “make” a mess.

We “build” relationships like we’re constructing furniture.

We talk about “investing” in friendships, about emotional “labor,” about people being “worth” our time. It’s as if we’ve imported the vocabulary of commerce and manufacturing into the realm of human connection, turning something organic and unpredictable into a project with measurable inputs and outputs.

But here’s what’s strange: we don’t have many words for the actual moment a friendship begins. We say “we met,” but that’s just proximity. We say “we clicked,” but that’s vague, almost mystical. English gives us precise language for the end of friendships (falling out, drifting apart, cutting ties) but not for the tentative, accidental beginning—that moment when two strangers decide, without quite deciding, to let each other matter.

This week’s essay prompt: “Write a story which involves making a new friendship.”; it’s question 4 from Variant 3 of the May 2025 Paper 2 series, and next week, we’ll come to the end of May 2025 (yay!)

Here’s what makes this prompt quietly treacherous: it sounds sweet, wholesome, safe.

Students will default to heartwarming meet-cutes or bonding-over-shared-hobbies scenes. But the strongest responses understand that real friendships rarely begin in moments of joy—they begin in moments of vulnerability, crisis, or accidental revelation.

The prompt says “involves” making a friendship, not “is about” it, which means the friendship doesn’t have to be the plot; it can be the consequence of the plot.

Can you write a story where two people become friends not because they like the same things, but because they recognize the same fear in each other? Can you show friendship forming in the cracks between words, in what’s not said but understood?

This tests whether you understand that narrative isn’t just about what happens—it’s about what changes. A new friendship is a transformation: two people who were separate become permeable to each other. The challenge is making that shift feel earned rather than convenient, showing the exact moment when strangers stop performing politeness and start risking honesty. Most students will write meeting scenes. The sophisticated ones will write recognition scenes—where characters see something true in each other and decide, despite every instinct for self-protection, to be seen back.

You’ll find the essay here!

The full essay is available for our premium members and is also marked and graded according to the IGCSE First Language English official rubrics and marking criteria. 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!