Search Here ….

Tags

0500 best books for storytelling Bird by Bird Anne Lamott books for aspiring writers Cambridge clarity in writing Cognitive science creative writing books Descriptive Writing economics Essay bank Exam Tips fiction writing tips First Language English Grammar grammar for writers how to write better IGCSE IGCSE 0500 IGCSE English IGCSE English First Language IGCSE First Language English improve grammar improve your writing International General Certificate of Secondary Education Learning Narrative writing nonfiction writing tips Paper 1 Reading Sample essays sepupunomics Sin and Syntax Constance Hale Steven Pinker The Sense of Style storytelling craft storytelling techniques Strunk and White The Elements of Style Writer's Effect Writer’s Effect Writing writing advice for students writing craft writing inspiration writing tips Writing Tools Roy Peter Clark

Sample Essays

Blog First Language English IGCSE English Paper 2 Sample Essays

Narrative Essay Reflection and Breakdown: Write a story with the title, ‘The path to success’. (May 2025 Variant 1, Question 5)

Victor Tan
 

Welcome back, friends!

January’s almost over, and I’ve been thinking about how English handles success.

We have this whole vocabulary of vertical movement: “climbing the ladder,” “reaching the top,” “rising to the occasion,” “making it big.” Success, in English, is always upward—as if achievement were a matter of altitude, not depth. But here’s what’s interesting: we don’t really have rich language for the horizontal work of success—the lateral connections, the sideways glances, the people who hold things steady while we climb.

We say “I owe you one” or “thanks for the help,” but these feel transactional, insufficient. Maybe that’s why moments of genuine recognition—when someone stops mid-climb to acknowledge the person who handed them the rope—feel so narratively powerful. They disrupt our vertical grammar of success and force us to look around rather than up.

This week’s essay prompt: “The path to success”; it’s question 5, the final descriptive/narrative prompt in Variant 1 of the May 2025 Paper 2 series. Next week we’ll circle back to May 2025 Q2 Variant 2!

Here’s what makes this prompt treacherous: it practically begs for cliché. Students will reach for the motivational poster version—obstacles overcome, lessons learned, hard work paying off. The problem isn’t that these elements are wrong; it’s that they’re expected. The prompt tests whether you can take a well-worn concept and make it feel newly observed, whether you can find an unexpected angle on achievement that reveals something true rather than something inspirational. The strongest responses understand that “the path to success” isn’t really about success at all—it’s about perspective, about who we see and who we render invisible on the way up. What makes success feel earned rather than granted? Who do we forget to thank, and why? This is where descriptive and narrative writing converge: you’re not just showing a journey; you’re making an argument through story about what success actually is. Can you write a moment where someone redefines achievement not through what they gained, but through who they finally learned to see? Can you make gratitude feel urgent, complicated, even subversive—rather than just polite?

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!

Write a story with the title, ‘The path to success’.

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!

Continue Reading....
Blog Descriptive Composition Sample Essays Site update

Descriptive Essay Reflection and Breakdown: Describe a time when you had to wait for a delivery (May 2025 Variant 1, Question 3)

Victor Tan
 

Welcome back, friends!

A week into the new year, and I’m already acutely aware that time is passing; I’ve already noticed something odd about how we talk about waiting. We say we “kill time,” as if time were the enemy and we were doing violence to it. But waiting isn’t really about time at all—it’s about attention. When you’re waiting for something that matters, every sound becomes a potential arrival: a car door slamming, footsteps in the hallway, the buzz of your phone. You’re not killing time; you’re hyper-alive to it, parsing every second for meaning. The English language has dozens of words for types of love (affection, devotion, infatuation) but only one word for this peculiar state of suspended animation where the whole world narrows to a single expected event. Maybe that’s why writing about waiting is so difficult—and so revealing. It forces you to find language for an experience that’s simultaneously boring and excruciating, mundane and loaded with stakes.

This week’s essay prompt: “Describe a time when you had to wait for a delivery”; it is question 2 in the May 2025 Paper 2 series.

Here’s what makes this prompt quietly dangerous: it invites you to write about something so ordinary that most students will treat it as trivial. A package arrives. You wait. It shows up. The end. But that’s exactly the trap. The best responses understand that “waiting” is never just waiting—it’s a container for anxiety, hope, impatience, and revelation.

What are you really waiting for? What does the delivery represent? The prompt tests whether you can take a contemporary, mundane scenario and find the emotional architecture beneath it and explore it with language. This is where many students falter: they describe the logistics (tracking numbers, delivery times, doorbell rings) without understanding that the power lies in what the waiting reveals about the person doing it.

Can you make us feel the weight of checking your phone for the hundredth time? Can you show us how a simple delivery becomes tangled with memory, responsibility, or fear? The question isn’t “what happened while you waited”—it’s “what did the waiting expose about you?”

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!

Describe a time when you had to wait for a delivery.

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!

Continue Reading....
Sample Essays Writer's Effect

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!

Continue Reading....