A few days ago, I received a request from a friend of mine who is studying a Master’s in Education at a university in Korea. It was a pretty simple request on the surface: 

Can you give me tips on my thesis? 

I was honoured to receive this request because she is a very educated woman. I won’t go into details, but she fits the criteria of being highly educated, extremely high IQ, and on the surface it would seem that someone like that wouldn’t need any help. 

But I had a look, and it turns out… She did. 

The thing itself was long, but that was not the problem.

The problem was that it was filled with dense and technical vocabulary words like “qualitative acceleration methodology” and so many others just randomly thrown around as she moved together a little picture that seemed to take shape inside her head, but it made sense to nobody else.

As I read it, the confusion escalated, and I found myself asking:

If you’re writing about education, then why write with such dense vocabulary?

To which a simple response formed in my head: 

We needed to simplify what she was saying. 

Now, you might think that this was a problem unique to my friend, but it’s actually a lot more common than you might think. Highly educated and very qualified people. Start writing about things they know and are passionate about, but they miss the forest or the trees and peppering. What they write with a near infinite variety of complicated words. They imagine that their goal has come to light. Unfortunately, it often does not. 

See, the point of a thesis is that it has to be understood by others, and more generally, the point of writing is so that it can be appreciated by the people who choose to read it. 

In other words, good writing has to be accessible to people’s minds – how you choose to do that is up to you, but that needs to be true – you need to arrange your sentences to make sure that people understand everything that you say, they have all the knowledge they need at every moment to understand everything else that you say – you have to make your piece accessible to the person who is reading it.

Some teachers like to say that as writers we should err on the side of human stupidity – that we should make things so clear and spelled out that there is no chance of misinterpretation. 

On hearing this advice, some of the readers out there then take this to mean that they should use grade school level words, stooping down, spelling everything out, literally treating the reader as someone who they regard as having a sub-par intellect. 

But really, and again, that misses the point. 

You see, in reality, the main point was always that whatever you wrote would be accessible to the person who was reading it – There’s no other deep or hidden point there. However you do it is up to you, which means that in reality, your language can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be, as long as you arrange it correctly. 

Here are some examples, featuring a few descriptions of flowers. (Level 1 accessible with a Free Membership – Levels 2 and 3 accessible to Premium members)

Three Tulip Fields: A Study in Accessible Beauty

Level 1: Simple Language

Level 2: Moderate Language

The sunlight finds you before you notice it—a gradual warmth spreading across your skin, turning everything amber and honey-thick.

Note on the exercise:

Each version employs the same core techniques—in medias res opening, sensory immersion, movement, specific detail, the interplay of individual and collective—but demonstrates how language complexity affects texture and rhythm without necessarily affecting emotional impact or clarity of vision. The simplest version uses directness and immediacy. The moderate builds layers. The complex creates intellectual texture. All three, ideally, should make you feel the field.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

As you can see, language complexity is actually only incidental to how high-quality a piece is. You could use the most simple language to create something beautiful, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t create something amazing with elaborate pieces either.

The simplest analogy I can make is that of LEGO. 

In the hands of a master, the simplest LEGO blocks can assemble themselves to create elaborate structures, while in the hands of an amateur, the most intricate LEGO set will not assemble itself into a finished product. As a writer, your job is to take the metaphorical LEGO blocks in your hands and to arrange them into something recognisable and accessible for the reader. 

The point for you, and I say this to myself as well, is not to treat others as stupid – it is to create something that others can appreciate, regardless of the complexity, to the audience and the people that you want to appreciate what you create. 

It was this advice that I gave to my friend, it was upon this advice that I helped her, and it is to this advice that I confer a simple title: 

The point of simplicity. 

I hope you enjoyed this post! If you enjoyed it, feel free to leave a comment down below – if you disagree with it, feel free to do the same; in all cases, if you benefited from it, consider sharing it with a friend who needs to see this 🙂

Thank you for reading, and till the next ones!

Victor.

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!

On this website, I very strongly emphasize the importance of rubric criteria.

Of course I should, and so should your teachers!

Rubrics tell you exactly how your papers are going to be marked, what is considered good, and what you should be doing in order to get the highest possible marks for every single piece of writing that you produce for this course, whether in class or in your final IGCSE exams.

There’s a small problem with relying purely on rubric criteria though:

They tell you what ‘good’ is, but they don’t give you the pathway.

Consider a few of these examples, demonstrating Level 6 from both descriptive and narrative writing in paper 2.

To get a Level 6 in Composition, Content and Structure, you must create complex, engaging and effective content. But what does it mean that content is complex, engaging and effective?

You also need to have a secure, well-balanced and carefully managed structure for deliberate effect. But what does it mean that your structure is secure, well-balanced and carefully managed?

As a student who is just hearing these words or reading them out on the screen, chances are you don’t have a good sense of what this entails.

Anybody can read the criteria and understand what they mean. You might even get a picture of them, but reading criteria isn’t the same as internalising or embodying a skill. A good example of this is sports.

Everybody knows that in order to run well and win an Olympic gold medal, you need to run really fast – but does knowing that you need to run fast mean that you can immediately clock 9.57 seconds for the 100 meter dash to beat Usain Bolt’s world record?

Most of you who have a little bit of common sense would know that that’s not really possible, or even if it is possible, it’s the territory of fantasy, because in order to get yourself to be that good of a runner, you need to actually practice, refine, and hone different aspects of your craft through running. In a similar way, the writer has to hone and refine aspects of their craft through writing.

Now, one might say that these are different, but they might be more similar than you think because writing is a skill, in the same way that running is a skill, and both can be trained through time and dedicated practice.

At the same time, there are efficient training methods and inefficient training methods, as you go about your day and you think about the journey that you want to have towards your goal.

I hope you will think a bit about that, consider joining premium memberships if you haven’t already, and gain access to lots of different written examples and other great resources for your IGCSE preparations.

And I hope that you have an amazing one, taking a step forward in a small or a big way, as you move forward on your journey!

Yours,

V.

If you’ve spent any time in any English class, whether it’s first language, second language, or whatever, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of P.E.E.L.

Sorry, not a good chance.

It’s inescapable. 

Point, Evidence, Explanation Link are the words this legendary acronym is based on, the general idea is to write a good paragraph by:

1. Making your point very clear

2. Immediately giving evidence for your point

3. Explaining what the evidence means in the context of your point

4. Linking it back to either the previous paragraph or to whatever essay prompt you’re trying to respond to.

Which is why PEEL paragraphs look like this. 

EXAMPLE

Prompt:

Write a letter to your school principal arguing for or against mandatory homework.

Writer’s Intent:

To argue that students should have the freedom to choose whether to complete homework assignments.

PEEL Paragraph:

Point:

Students should be given the autonomy to decide whether homework helps their learning, rather than being forced to complete it regardless of its value.

Evidence:

A 2019 study by Stanford University found that students doing more than two hours of homework per night reported higher stress levels, physical health problems, and actually performed worse academically than peers with moderate homework loads.

Explanation:

This research shows that mandatory homework isn’t automatically beneficial—in fact, it can actively harm students when it becomes excessive or meaningless. Different students learn differently: some genuinely benefit from practice at home, while others need rest, extracurricular activities, or simply learn better through in-class work. By making homework optional, schools acknowledge that students understand their own learning needs and can make responsible choices about how to use their time productively.

Link:

Trusting students with this decision would not only improve their wellbeing but also teach them valuable self-management skills they’ll need in university and careers.

So that’s what it looks like. 

But is it the only way of writing an essay? 

No, not at all. 

Let’s deviate away to see that that’s true – here are a few other schemata that could also work for the same paragraph, available for our Premium Members!

With all that said, why do teachers keep on teaching P.E.E.L like dogma, repeating it in class after class when there are so many possible and alternate constructions? 

Part of the answer is convenience. 

If you pay attention you will notice that PEEL is not only thought but also rewarded because it’s very easy to look at every paragraph and then check student paragraphs to see if they have the points, the evidence, the explanations, and the links straight away.

Also, it’s easier to keep your students from becoming confused and make sure that they follow a specific way of doing things rather than just opening up their minds to different possibilities or to ask them to reach for something that they otherwise don’t have experience with.

But it’s also true that PEEL accomplishes a very specific teaching purpose. 

It forces students to do the one thing they most resist: actually explain the connection between their evidence and their claim.

Evidence doesn’t speaks for itself – you need to contextualize it. 

What’s missing is the entire cognitive act of argumentation: showing how that quote demonstrates that claim, why those specific words matter, what the quote reveals that wouldn’t be obvious without analysis.

A student who mechanically applies PEEL at least produces something with basic argumentative structure. 

A student freed from structure too early typically produces some of the following:

∙ Unsupported assertions

∙ Quote-dropping without analysis

∙ Circular reasoning

∙ Paragraphs that don’t connect to anything

…But it’s not the only way to write. 

What did you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!