CSS Essay: expected examination topics

 Here are some factual observations based on the last 25 years of the CSS Essay exam topics. 

1. Gender-related themes feature consistently across the years. If not every year, every other year there is some topic related to the status, social well-being or the empowerment of the better half of humanity.

2. Topical issues (i.e. challenges or concerns that have recently been significant) tend to crop up among the essay topics. No surprise that over the first decade of the current century, 'terrorism' was a favourite prompt (five times).

3. 'Environment' and the crisis of natural resources are evergreen themes for the CSS essay.

4. Reflective topics based on popular aphorisms and psychological or philosophical truisms are a perennial obsession of CSS paper-setters. 

5. 'Pakistan' (again, no surprise) by name or without being named is another obvious focal interest. In particular, recently pressing issues often find their way in. [Example: Administrative devolution took place in Pakistan around the turn of the century →'Devolution of Power' (2001)]. 

Three elements of an effective introduction

The introduction to the essay must perform three functions. It can be said to be effective or ineffective to the degree that it carries these out. 

First and foremost, the introduction must captivate the reader. If the reader doesn't feel like sitting up during the opening of the essay, slogging through the rest of the essay will be pure drudgery for them–and worse, it will be at your expense. Use one of the tried and tested techniques to capture the attention of the audience. Start your essay with a rhetorical question, a story, a quotation or a striking fact relevant to the forthcoming thesis, or at the very least, related to the  topic. 

But simply using one of these techniques at the outset does not guarantee an effective opening. The attention-grabber must transition steadily to the thesis. The bridge between the catchy opening and the central claim must be short as well as strong. Right after employing one of these techniques, use a phrase or a sentence pointing straight in the direction of the thesis. Don't explain the attention-getter. Don't comment on it.

The third element of an effective introduction is the essay preview. Next to the thesis itself, the reader would feel very pleased to see a snapshot of the unfolding essay. It can be done by expanding on the thesis in a few sentences or better, by laying out the skeleton of the essay. 

To recap, the attention-grabber should give a heads up to the thesis it wants to spotlight before the introduction is tucked in neatly with the help of an outline of the main points.  

  

The four tools of précis writing

First things first: What is the goal in précis writing? 

The goal is to extract the thesis and the main points, out of the complex structure of an argument.   

The science of the précis boils down to a clever deployment of four tools. 

The first tool or strategy is as obvious as the difference between short and long. A given passage is roughly three to four times the length of the expected précis. The only way you can hammer a précis out of the passage is by massively excising the latter. I call this strategy—hold your breath—deletion. But you have to apply deletion mindfully, taking care not to chop out a main point. 

That brings us to the other three strategies. Generalization is to induce the general theme or idea from specific instances. e.g. 'Farid is a student who is hardworking. He is also very bright.' These statements could be generalized to a single proposition such as the following: Farid is a good student. 

Similar to but separate from generalization is the move I call synthesis. This is where you combine multiple ideas, even as you keep up some of the original phrasing. Playing with the same example, the synthesis of the two sentences would be: Farid is a bright and hardworking student. Note that unlike generalization, synthesis retains the actual wording but fuses the two separate sentences into a single syntactic whole.

Finally, paraphrasing : this is the simple act of rewording a statement with the help of synonymous phrases and grammatical reconstruction. As a student, Farid is at once smart and diligent. 

Weed out the need-less

If you enjoy chips or biscuits, I bet you like them crispy. The same is true for sentences. If you tend to use words or phrases that fill the sentence but do not advance the idea much, the reader will feel like chewing soggy fries or cookies. Here’s the advice for you. Expunge, edit out, eliminate and scratch all such unnecessary verbal expressions.

Which sentence do you like better: the last sentence or the following one? 

Omit unnecessary words.

One of the best books on style is by the linguist Steven Pinker: The Sense of Style: the Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. He calls redundant phrases “morbidly obese” and offers the following as examples alongside the “healthy” alternatives in the right-hand column.

To recap, “redundancy”, the technical term for needless words, produces verbiage or bloated prose. One of the best ways to rid yourself of stylistic flaws (such as redundancy) is to expose yourself to models of excellent prose. Anyone whose primary feed is The Economist or The Atlantic is less likely to write bad prose than someone whose meat of choice is The News or DAWN.