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!

Write a description with the title, ‘The shelter’.

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!

Hello, everyone!

Happy Malaysia Day to all of you who are from Malaysia!

On another and related note, those of you who know me probably know that I am a big fan of Lee Kuan Yew. 

Well, that’s a bit of a small understatement. I mean, it would have to be for someone who was somehow so moved that he decided to write an entire book about Lee Kuan Yew, which is by the way exactly what I did. 

This Malaysia Day, 16 September, I’m very happy to announce the release of “One Date, Two Destinies: Lee Kuan Yew and the Birth of Malaysia and Singapore”, at a (Malaysia Day) discount!

Pick it up here!

Link: https://victortanws.gumroad.com/l/september16th 

Also, here’s a sample that you can have a look at to preview the contents!

This was a fun project to engage in, writing about the entire track of Lee Kuan Yew’s history from his birth up until the end. 

I think it is crucial to look back at the past to understand history better, and this is one of the first things that a person will understand, I think, if they look just a little bit beneath the surface of Malaysian history and that which we call Malaysia. 

I don’t think that there is quite a project that is like this, but I think that it was an extremely fun one – It contains many of my own personal reflections about Mr. Lee and the role that he played in Malaysia and Singapore, and in our shared history together, one that was born from a time of what can rightfully be called trauma. 

I hope that you will find it meaningful and valuable for your own personal development and growth even as you reflect on these stories. 

Thank you for your support in advance if you would like to purchase the book!

Yours, 

V.