Welcome back, all — and, fittingly for our final essay in this series, let’s talk about the language of not giving up. English has a whole gritty little vocabulary for it: “grit”, “guts”, “backbone”, “stickability”. Notice how bodily they are again — willpower is imagined as something physical, something in the spine and the jaw, not the mind. We locate determination in the body because that is where it is actually felt.

There’s also the strange power of counting. “One more step.” “Just five more.” When we are at our limit, we shrink the future down to the next single unit, because the whole distance is unbearable but the next step is not. That’s not just psychology; it’s a rhythm, and rhythm is something prose can reproduce on the page.

This week’s essay prompt: “Write a story that involves someone showing determination.” — Question 5 from the October/November 2025 Paper 2 series.

Here’s the danger: “determination” invites the epic — climbing the mountain, winning the final. But scale is not the same as intensity. The strongest responses often shrink the goal right down — a few steps between parallel bars — and mine that small, close-range struggle for far more drama than a montage of triumphs ever could.

The most sophisticated writers understand that determination isn’t really the cheering or the finish line; it’s the quiet, offered exit — the open door back to the easier thing — and the choice to shut it. A top-band narrative locates its climax in that refusal, not in the victory.

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 see how a top-band narrative counts twelve small steps between parallel bars into a study of willpower — and how a character shifting their goal from “twelve” to “fourteen” can end a story on pure, earned defiance.

And if you want to know how your own writing measures up, our IGCSE Essay Marker gives you instant, rubric-aligned feedback on your own descriptive and narrative compositions in seconds.

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