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