Victor Tan

The author has 135 posts

Writer’s Effect Sample Responses Updated to May 2025!

Victor Tan
 

Hi everyone! Great to catch you again!

I thought some of you might like to know that Writer’s Effect sample responses have been updated to May 2025, closing up the gap that we had before with 2023. Things should be a little bit more robust now, and you’ll have plenty of different samples and examples to look through.

Writer’s effect has always been a big issue that students of mine have struggled with throughout the course of my time teaching this subject – it’s not a surprise because understanding language itself is hard, especially if you are not actually a first-language speaker. It’s even harder to be able to look at the effects of language, especially if you don’t have the vocabulary understanding or methods of analysis in your head down pat; nonetheless, I hope that the examples will help you get a sense of what you need in order to do well with the analysis!

As with all of the other sample responses, gradings by examiners are provided, and you will have a sense of what good responses look like through the different examples. Of course, reading alone isn’t enough to help you develop the skill that you’re looking for. And practice is very much needed also!

The responses are accessible to our premium members, and you can have a look at them here.

If you haven’t signed up for premium yet, remember that in this discount period, you can enjoy more than 50% off relative to what you had before (It is for the new year $12 monthly as opposed to $25!), and updates come weekly – sign up here!

If you are unable to, feel free nonetheless to browse any of our guides. Ask on Writer’s Effect or any of the other aspects of the FirstLanguageEnglish.com curriculum!

First Descriptive Essay Bank Update of 2026!

Victor Tan
 

Welcome back, friends!

It’s funny how we collectively decided that flipping a calendar page should feel so significant, and everywhere you look right now, people are doing their “year in review” exercises, choosing words of the year, setting intentions. There’s something almost performative about it—this ritualized pause where we pretend we can neatly package 365 days of chaos into bullet points and lessons learned.

With that in mind, big update here for all of us – I’ll be creating a series of weekly updates and prompt breakdowns of our May 2025 IGCSE Descriptive and Narrative essay prompts from paper 2, and you’ll see me pop by a little more frequently! These can all be found in our descriptive and narrative essay banks, available to premium members, but the breakdowns are free!

Each of the essays will become available once every week to all members. If you see a page not found error, when you click on the Descriptive and Narrative Essay Bank, that’s normal because the essays will only be released after each Tuesday.

This brings us to today’s essay prompt: “Write a description with the title, ‘The shelter’.”; it is the first question in the May 2025 Paper 2 series.

What makes this prompt deceptively brilliant is that it forces you to write about containment during chaos—and that constraint is the point. The best descriptive writing doesn’t sprawl; it compresses.

The shelter prompt tests whether you can use architectural details to reveal psychological states, whether you can make concrete walls speak to human fragility. Here’s the trick most students miss: shelter isn’t really about the building—it’s about what people carry with them when everything else has been stripped away. A great response understands that you’re not describing a place; you’re describing humanity under duress, using the place as your lens. The question becomes: can you zoom from the wide shot (the storm, the crowd, the chaos) down to the intimate close-up (a trembling hand, a torn photograph, a child’s wobbling handwriting) in a way that makes the reader feel what safety costs?

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!

Happy New Year, Everyone!

Victor Tan
 

Happy New Year, everyone. It’s been a while since this site has been updated, but we have plenty coming up for you very soon. In the meantime, I hope that you’ve all been well and that you are looking forward to more content in the upcoming year. If you have any suggestions for content or otherwise that you are interested to hear about even as we pursue more ambitious plans in the days ahead, I hope that you will consider emailing them over to me at victortanws@gmail.com or by Instagram to @victortanws.

It’s going to be a wonderful year for all of you out there, and for those of you who are just discovering this site for the very first time, I hope that you will have a wonderful journey into the beauty of the English language whether through English First Language.net or through the course of your journeys in high school.

To those of you who are teachers and who are reading this as well, thank you for your hard work and the hard work that you will do even as you move into this new academic year. Many people rely on you, and many of you out there continue to serve a wonderful role in bringing light, life, and enjoyment to the journeys of your students and by extension, the world that we live in.

So I hope that you will go with that new sense of renewal and pride in everything it is that you are doing. Thank you for using this site, and I look forward to updating you all very soon. Have a wonderful day ahead, and till we meet!