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