Three candidates are better than one!

 Remember the game of darts?

Creating thesis options for yourself is somewhat like the three chances in the game of darts. Hopefully, one of them would hit the bull’s eye! 
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A good essay is pivoted in a centrally significant thesis.

But the road to a solid, defensible essay thesis is not always the quickest path between your thinking mind and the essay introduction in which the thesis resides.

You’ll recall that in the CSS Essay examination there are three types of topic formulations. Where the essay thesis is identified with the given topic itself, you have no option but to build upon that. But in situations where the topic is in phrasal form or is a question, after generating ideas and narrowing the scope of the topic, craft, not one but at least three claim statements. Then compare the three candidates and choose the one you would give the highest score in clarity as well as strength of opinion.

Don't forget: Essay writing is a competition!

If you are writing an essay as part of an examination—in 

particular a competitive exam—it doesn’t really matter 

how good your essay is on objective merit. 

You are screwed if your essay fails to make the examiner 

sit up and read it through. Even that is not enough. Your 

essay has to convince them that it is better than 90% of 

the other pieces they have to grade, if that is the passing 

mark. If the bar is higher (say only the top 5% pass—who 

knows?), a 95 percentile cut-off would make this almost a 

blood sport.

In a sport contest, demonstrating your superior prowess 

amounts to a sharp focus on the mission of the game, 

knowledge of all the rules in the playbook and finally a 

fool-proof game plan.

In the essay contest, your mission is not to write a good 

essay. It is to write an essay that beats 90% of other essays 

in assessment. Moreover, no matter how well you write, it 

is the examiner who awards the grade. If you have to 

appeal to an examiner in haste who has 50 more scripts to 

mark in the ongoing session after assessing your essay—

which is script number 38—what tactics can you bank on? 

What care should you take to avoid frustrating the 

examiner, generally speaking? What kind of blunders in 

your style, structure or presentation would stereotype your 

essay in negative terms?

To speak constructively, how do you envisage 

distinguishing your performance from all the others 

auditioning against you?

Good handwriting: an unfair advantage!

Here’s a little secret from someone who has assessed thousands of examination answer scripts. Handwriting creates an unfair bias either towards the examinee or against him/her.

That is a sad truth. Some of the most brilliant minds I have interacted with in life (professors, researchers, students and professionals) have such a pathetic hand, it is a small wonder that they made it through grade school. I digress only to reassure you—in case you are dissatisfied with your hand—that you too might have seeds of genius in you!

Back to why good handwriting gives you a positive edge over others in the essay paper. It has to do with one elementary fact about examiners. They are human. Examiners are usually assigned hundreds of scripts that have to be graded within a tight schedule. Beyond a point, their attention naturally begins to wobble, drained by hours of evaluating (mostly) bad prose.

Now, given these constraints, examiners tend to rely on first impressions rather too frequently. If your handwriting is legible, regular and consistent; if your margins are straight, and you haven’t smudged ink and crossed out too many sentences, the examiner would be charmed into reading on.

But with a bad hand, even a George Orwell may not receive a fair share of the examiner’s attention.

Two sentences about sentence variety

Sentences vary in many ways e.g. in being short or long. 

What matters is that you draw on the many types—brewing single-clause propositions with multi-clause compound-complex sentences, mingling the declaratives with questions, imperatives and exclamatives, and blending periodic sentences with strung-along clauses—avoiding at once the monotonous thuds of successive short sentences and the muddiness of excessively long, adverbially qualified statements, (which, as Verlyn Klinkenborg says lack the power of implication, “the ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow, the ability to speak to the reader in silence”), hoping to get the attention of the work-stressed and time-constrained reader/examiner who is browned off by the drudgery of assessment and tempted to hastily make up her mind about the essay grade sooner than your essay deserves, even as you have worked your tail off to keep the reader stimulated by peppering your prose with periodic sentences built with prepositional phrases, brought forward (for a dash of variety) to the front of the sentence, thus adding to the myriads of ways in which different types of sentences can be juggled in a single piece, and create the effects of suspense, emphasis, subordination and so forth: in the evocative words of Gertrude Stein, “like a cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own difference”.

The structure of expository and persuasive essays

 

The opening of an essay arrests the attention of the reader, urging her to read on. The attention-grabber transitions smoothly to the central idea or the thesis. 

Mind you the structure presented in the exhibit above applies mainly to expository and persuasive writing. 

Once you have planted your stake in the ground i.e. asserted the primary claim, there are four more steps to carry out. 

(a). Present 3-5 main points in support of the thesis.

(b). Defend each point with concrete evidence. 

(c). Review your discussion by recapitulating the claim and the points. 

(d) Close your essay in style, memorably with a statement that would stick with the reader.

Essay maestros may diverge from this format and still create gems.Ordinary mortals like ourselves should play by the rules.

How not to start your essay

You can’t do worse than to turn your opening paragraph into a think-aloud section, strewn with random sentences on the topic, moving like flotsam and jetsam in the Lyari nullah in Karachi. Once you have lost the examiner’s respect for your introduction—and that can happen within the first 30 seconds—it would be hard to regain their attention favourably, no matter how stellar the rest of your essay is.

Another sure-fire way to lose the examiner’s interest in your essay is to begin with a cliché. Let’s say, you are writing on ‘The suffering soul in the scientific age’ and you begin: “Science and technology have been a great blessing to humanity… (The examiner yawns). Yet, they have also been a curse in many ways as people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can testify to this day” (The yawn becomes bigger!).

Another bummer is a done-to-death quotation or proverb vaguely related to the topic. Avoid such an opening like COVID-19! Given the topic ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’, let's say you kick off by saying: “There is a proverb in English, Honesty is the best policy. No one can deny the universal truth of this maxim”.

Well, to be honest, you will find folks to question the validity of the proverb itself. But with an opening of this kind, you won’t find an examiner in the world eager to read the rest of the essay! 

What's the best topic to write on?

All topics are not equal. On the day of the examination, your chances of writing a great essay would vary from topic to topic based on a number of factors. 

Here’s how to make the right decision. First: look at the wording. Some of the topic options are phrases (e.g. ‘Global warming’); others are questions (e.g. ‘Can meaning be fixed?’) or claims (e.g. ‘Dialogue is the best course to combat terrorism’). In general, prefer topic claims over questions, and questions over topic phrases. 

Here's why. 

Topic phrases are open-ended and would need a heck of spadework. Questions are better in that they imply a range of specific topic areas you are expected to discuss. However, if you choose a topic question, you must be able to discuss it from at least two angles. 

Topic claims are the best. Your stance on the subject is pre-decided on your behalf. You may already be loaded with ideas and evidence. All you would need is an essay plan.    

The second factor to consider in choosing the right topic is the quality of the thesis on which you expect to peg your essay. If you fear a certain topic would take you down a tunnel of a beat-up position that nine people out of 10 already agree to or on the other hand it would be a hot potato (i.e. the topic would push you into taking a highly controversial position), scratch that option. 

The third and perhaps the most important consideration should be the resources or the raw material at hand. Which of the given topics brings to mind lots of examples, quotations, statistics, facts or/and stories? 

And yes, don't forget to compare the relative appeal of the topics. Avoid proverbs (e.g. ‘All work and no play make Jack a dull boy’), predictably popular topics (e.g. 'The post-covid-19 economy’) and survey-type discussion topics (‘Energy crisis in Pakistan: causes and consequences’).

If all this sounds too complicated, rely on the this flow chart to make the right decision. 

9 reasons why English matters more to CSS success than people think!

If you are reading this post, chances are you probably know most of them already. Still, the importance of mastering English communication skills is worth reiterating. Here are the top 9 reasons why you should not stop investing in improving your proficiency in the language, even after you have crossed all the hoops and become a CSP officer.     

1. The Central Superior Services Examination includes two English papers that are compulsory. Fail even one of them and you are out of the race. But wait. There’s a lot more!
2. Isn’t English the medium of examination for most papers? Think about that! If you improve your grammar, vocabulary, spellings and punctuation and your penmanship (hand writing), they will serve you well in all your papers.  
3. Essay writing is the default mode of answering most of the questions in most of the subjects. If you master the English essay, you will be on top of the academic writing game across disciplines.
4. Preparation for all but a handful of optional subjects requires loads of reading. Guess the language in which you will find most of the resources for most of your papers.   
5. Being able to read a passage quickly and respond to comprehension questions requires skimming and scanning. These are reading strategies that improve one’s academic efficiency regardless of the subject.    
6. Plenty of prep resources are in the form of audio-visual lectures, discussions and interviews on YouTube, TED and other platforms.
7. What about note-taking? It should be a no-brainer that if your medium of examination is Turkish, the notes you take down during preparation would be more helpful in Turkish than in Swahili, Tamil or Tok Pisin—even if any of these happens to be your first language. Hope you get the point!
8. Being able to write a good précis amounts to being able capture the central idea and the main points in a piece. Once again, the usefulness of the skill is hardly exclusive to the English paper. Research shows the knack to spot and synthesize the gist of an article or essay is one of the measures of academic and professional success.
9. You have made it to the merit list. Now comes psychological assessment and then the interview. Guess which language gives you the ultimate edge over your competitors?         

Congratulations! You are now a Civil Servant of Pakistan. Whether you like it or not, English is still the language of our bureaucracy. Master it now: you will reap the rewards for the rest of your life! As Anwer Masood, the great poet from Gujrat says:   

Avoiding failure doesn't guarantee success!

In 1968, Frederick Herzberg published what became the article most widely requested for reprints on Harvard Business Review. Herzberg turned the conventional wisdom on its head by arguing that factors that keep employees positively engaged and energized in their organization (e.g. meaningfulness of work) are other than or separate from the factors which demotivate them (e.g. poor salary). The 2-Factor Theory famously debunked the value organizations placed on material compensation as the core driver of employee motivation.

Success in the CSS English papers is somewhat like that. 

Yes, you do have to work on factors of failure—weak grammar, poor spellings, bad hand writing. But fixing these problems won’t guarantee success. 

Why? 

Because factors of success in the Essay as well as in the Precis and Composition paper are separate from the problems which lead to failure. 

It is ultimately the coherence of your argument, the quality of your presentation and the clarity of your expression that would win you a place on the merit list, provided, as I said, your grammar, spellings and your hand writing don't get in the way. 

Conversely,  even if your grammar is immaculate, your spellings are perfect and your hand writing is as symmetrical as printed fonts, these virtues combined won't alone suffice to earn you a passing grade.  

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