Welcome back, friends!

January’s almost over, and I’ve been thinking about how English handles success.

We have this whole vocabulary of vertical movement: “climbing the ladder,” “reaching the top,” “rising to the occasion,” “making it big.” Success, in English, is always upward—as if achievement were a matter of altitude, not depth. But here’s what’s interesting: we don’t really have rich language for the horizontal work of success—the lateral connections, the sideways glances, the people who hold things steady while we climb.

We say “I owe you one” or “thanks for the help,” but these feel transactional, insufficient. Maybe that’s why moments of genuine recognition—when someone stops mid-climb to acknowledge the person who handed them the rope—feel so narratively powerful. They disrupt our vertical grammar of success and force us to look around rather than up.

This week’s essay prompt: “The path to success”; it’s question 5, the final descriptive/narrative prompt in Variant 1 of the May 2025 Paper 2 series. Next week we’ll circle back to May 2025 Q2 Variant 2!

Here’s what makes this prompt treacherous: it practically begs for cliché. Students will reach for the motivational poster version—obstacles overcome, lessons learned, hard work paying off. The problem isn’t that these elements are wrong; it’s that they’re expected. The prompt tests whether you can take a well-worn concept and make it feel newly observed, whether you can find an unexpected angle on achievement that reveals something true rather than something inspirational. The strongest responses understand that “the path to success” isn’t really about success at all—it’s about perspective, about who we see and who we render invisible on the way up. What makes success feel earned rather than granted? Who do we forget to thank, and why? This is where descriptive and narrative writing converge: you’re not just showing a journey; you’re making an argument through story about what success actually is. Can you write a moment where someone redefines achievement not through what they gained, but through who they finally learned to see? Can you make gratitude feel urgent, complicated, even subversive—rather than just polite?

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!

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