I was sitting in a cramped examination hall last Tuesday, the air thick with the smell of stale coffee and nervous sweat, watching a student stare blankly at an informal email prompt. He knew the vocabulary, but he was paralyzed by the fear of being “too casual.” He thought that to avoid losing marks, he
I was sitting in a cramped, windowless exam hall last Tuesday, watching a student—a brilliant man in his forties—stare blankly at his essay paper. He knew the subject matter inside out, but he was paralyzed by the fear that he didn’t know how to write formally enough. He kept trying to use these massive, archaic
I was sitting in a quiet corner of a testing center last Tuesday, marking a stack of essays, when I saw it again: a student using the word “good” to describe a complex economic policy. It’s a word that feels safe, but in an exam setting, it is lethal. Most textbooks will tell you that
I remember sitting in a cramped exam hall years ago, watching a student’s face fall as they realized they’d run out of time before even reaching the second half of their essay. They hadn’t lacked ideas; they had simply buried them under a mountain of useless filler. Most students think that using “big words” or
I was sitting in my office last Tuesday, grading a stack of IELTS essays, when I saw it again—the same bloated, three-line sentence trying to say what could have been said in five words. Most students think that “academic” means “long,” but that is a lie that costs them their Band 7. They believe they
I was sitting in a cramped exam center in Johannesburg last Tuesday, watching a student stare at a blank page, when I realized they weren’t struggling with ideas—they were struggling with rhythm. They knew what they wanted to say, but their writing felt like a metronome: thump, thump, thump. Most textbooks will tell you that
I was sitting in a cramped, overheated exam hall last Tuesday, staring at a pile of essays from students who had clearly studied for months. They had the vocabulary, they had the complex grammar, and they had the ambition—but they were bleeding marks because they didn’t understand how to write a topic sentence that actually
I remember sitting in a cramped, poorly lit classroom in Johannesburg, staring at a stack of exam scripts that felt more like a crime scene than a collection of essays. One student, a brilliant man in his forties, had the ideas of a philosopher but the structure of a broken radio. He kept jumping from
I was sitting in a cramped, overheated exam hall last Tuesday, staring at a script that was practically a graveyard of lost points. The student was clearly brilliant—a professional with a decade of experience—yet they had tried to “sound academic” by layering clause upon clause until the meaning simply evaporated. It is the most heartbreaking
I can still see them clearly: the faces of my students sitting in that quiet exam hall, staring at a blank page with a look of pure, unadulterated panic. I remember one particular student, a brilliant man in his forties, who spent forty minutes scribbling frantic, disconnected sentences only to realize he’d completely lost his