“Uncomfortable” is a fascinating word.

We use it to describe a scratchy sweater, an awkward silence, a moral compromise, and existential dread. It’s become English’s polite catchall for anything that makes us want to look away, shift our weight, or pretend we didn’t notice. But here’s what fascinates me: unlike precise languages that have separate words for physical discomfort versus social discomfort versus ethical discomfort, English smooshes them all together under one vague umbrella. Maybe that’s by design. Maybe calling something “uncomfortable” is our way of minimizing it, of treating moral crisis with the same shrug we’d give a too-warm room. The word lets us acknowledge distress without actually naming what’s causing it—which means we can witness suffering and file it under “mildly unpleasant” rather than “something I should do something about.”

This week’s essay prompt: “Describe an uncomfortable ride on public transport.“; it’s question 2 from Variant 3 of the May 2025 Paper 2 series, and we need to write a descriptive essay!

Here’s what makes this prompt quietly brilliant: it drops you into a space where discomfort is compulsory. You can’t escape public transport—you’re trapped with strangers in close quarters, forced to negotiate bodies and boundaries and the unspoken rules about where to look and what to ignore. Most students will write about surface-level discomfort: crowding, heat, delays, annoying passengers. But the strongest responses understand that physical discomfort is just the entry point. The real challenge is exploring why public transport makes us uncomfortable in ways that private transport doesn’t. It strips away the illusion of control. It forces proximity with people whose lives are colliding with ours whether we consent or not. The question becomes: can you write a description where the physical discomfort (the crush, the heat, the invasion of personal space) becomes inseparable from social or moral discomfort? Can you capture that uniquely modern anxiety of being surrounded by strangers while everyone pretends to be alone? And here’s the sophistication test: can you show a moment where the narrator stops being a passive victim of discomfort and becomes someone who must decide whether to keep looking away or to finally see—really see—the person beside them?

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!

Welcome back, friends!

Last week I wrote about how we’ve inflated the word “extraordinary” until it means almost nothing.

This week, I’ve been thinking about the opposite problem: words that have become too small, too casual, to carry the weight we actually need them to hold. Take “switch.”

We use it dozens of times a day—switching tabs, switching lanes, switching topics in conversation—and the word has become so frictionless that we barely notice it. But etymologically, “switch” comes from a Low German word meaning “a thin flexible shoot or twig,” something used for striking or redirecting.

It was always about force. About deflection. About changing direction through decisive action, often violent action.

Somewhere along the way, we turned it into something you do with your thumb on a screen. What fascinates me about English is how certain words retain their original violence just beneath the surface, waiting to be reactivated. A switch isn’t passive. It’s a moment when you impose your will on a system. It’s the instant when inertia ends and something new—sometimes irreversible—begins.

This week’s essay prompt: “Write a story with the title, ‘The switch’.“; it’s question 5 from the May 2025 Paper 2 series in Variant 2 – we’ll continue next week with Variant 3!

Here’s what makes this prompt brilliantly constrained: it gives you almost nothing. Two words. No context. No genre hints. Most students will panic at this openness and default to the most literal interpretation—someone flipping a light switch, or a magical switcheroo between bodies. But the strongest narratives understand that when a prompt gives you a title this spare, that title isn’t just a label—it’s a structural anchor. Everything in your story must orbit that word. The challenge is deciding which kind of switch you’re writing about: Is it a physical object (button, lever, circuit breaker)? A moment of decision (moral switch, psychological turning point)? A metaphorical exchange (role reversal, identity swap)? The best responses do both at once—they use a concrete, literal switch to embody an abstract transformation. This tests whether you understand that good narrative titles aren’t decorative; they’re compression devices. They tell you what your story is really about. So the question becomes: can you write a story where flipping an alarm switch is simultaneously an act of rescue, an act of defiance, and a moment when someone stops being a passive observer and becomes the person who changes what happens next? Can you make one physical gesture carry the full weight of consequence, choice, and transformation? That’s not just storytelling—that’s understanding how titles create meaning through resonance between the literal and the figurative.

You’ll find the essay here!

The full essay is available for our premium members and is also marked and graded. 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!

If we enjoy what we do, we are more likely to do it, for it is what we enjoy.

That’s the small insight that appeared in my mind today; that it is through enjoyment that a person practices for long hours, refines their craft, creates entire tapestries from mere words stitched together beyond exam sheets and scripts – it is how a person can write a book without using AI when the payoff is uncertain and the hours are long.

It is true that writing a book or practicing for an exam shouldn’t purely be a matter of passion and should be a matter of systems, processes, and discipline; without systems, you limit your attainment to the height of your passion, after all.

Yet, it is true that without enjoyment, you limit your motivation to the dictates of planning – useful and needed – but discount the greater possibilities ahead that come from a genuine passion.

To find that passion is almost a matter of chance – and I was deliberate with that wording. Passion must be ‘found’ – actively located, whether searched for or come across; yet it is ‘almost’ a matter of chance and not certainly, for while it is possible that the literary child can form in a home with books, so too can she come into being in one without them through the sheer force of will and conscious effort to see…

These words matter.

The words I choose matter.

If I stitch the quilt a different way, people will understand it differently – by the staccato drumbeat of my fingers on this page and by the smell and markings of black ink on my fingers, they will see new possibilities – possibilities that I will unearth by the written page word by word, minute by minute, asking myself:

Why is this good?

Why is that better?

Why was that bad?

Why was what he did, she said, they wrote so incredibly captivating?

I want to know – I want to know – I want to know!!!

When that frame of mind begins to set in, a subtle realignment happens; refining your craft ceases to be a chore, but instead a higher aspiration; work becomes play, and practice becomes meaningful in ways that it never had before – something valuable for the possibilities that it unlocks within a person’s soul and something valuable enough that you would set forth on the journey of writing even if the chance of a reward was that of a snowflake’s right to exist in an inferno – and thus you refine ceaselessly no matter where you are, what you are doing, wherever you are, without anyone telling you to do so; before you know it, you are directing the ship and improving for your sake, not mine.

It’s strange that it’s through that frame of enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake that a person might be best able to reap the external rewards of an A*, isn’t it?

To go above, one must first go below.

It is a strange irony.

Welcome back, friends!

We call everything extraordinary now—a sandwich, a sunset, a Tuesday afternoon.

The word comes from Latin: extra ordinem, “outside the usual order.”

It was meant to describe things that break the pattern, that violate what we expect from the world. But we’ve inflated it until it’s lost all pressure. Maybe that’s because we’re afraid of ordinariness, or maybe it’s because English doesn’t give us a good middle ground between “boring” and “life-changing.” We don’t have words for the subtle gradations of remarkableness—the moment that’s interesting but not stunning, memorable but not transformative. So we reach for “extraordinary” and flatten its meaning. Here’s what I find fascinating: when something truly extraordinary happens, we often go quiet. We strip away the adjectives. We say, “I can’t describe it.” The real extraordinary resists language altogether.

This week’s essay prompt: “Write a story which involves an extraordinary journey.”; it’s question 4 from the May 2025 Paper 2 series.

This prompt sets a trap that most students will walk straight into: they’ll confuse “extraordinary” with “exotic.” They’ll write about plane crashes in jungles, time travel, or epic quests through fantasy landscapes. But here’s the challenge buried in that single word “involves”—it doesn’t say the journey is extraordinary; it says the story involves one. That’s a crucial distinction. The strongest responses understand that an extraordinary journey isn’t necessarily about spectacular events; it’s about a journey that transforms the person taking it. This is where narrative writing diverges from adventure storytelling: you’re not just chronicling what happens, you’re revealing why it matters. Can you write about a bus ride up a mountain and make it feel extraordinary because of what the narrator is carrying—guilt, fear, unfinished business? Can you create a journey where the external obstacles (fog, landslide, broken bridge) mirror the internal ones (shame, courage, the decision to return home)? The prompt tests whether you understand that “extraordinary” is a judgment made in retrospect, not a quality inherent to the events themselves. A journey becomes extraordinary when the person who took it is no longer the same person who began it—and your job as the writer is to show us that transformation through action, choice, and consequence, not through telling us it was extraordinary.

You’ll find the essay here!

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!