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.          

10 tips on vocabulary building

1. Target learning just 5 new words a day. For each word, note its English meaning, as well as its Urdu meaning, its pronunciation, 2-3 synonyms and craft at least one sentence illustrating its meaning. 

2. Instead of cramming random vocabulary lists (GRE/TOEFL/SAT/GMAT etc), pick your words from the newspaper and from books and blogs related to your topics of exam preparation. 

3. Maintain a dedicated vocabulary register for noting down new words as described in (1). Don't work on your vocabulary on loose sheets of paper or in notebooks shared with other subjects. 

4. In addition to the vocabulary register, also maintain a pocket notebook for vocabulary building. From time to time, copy words and their meanings from the register to the pocket notebook.

5. Play the game of Scrabble a couple of times each month. 

6. In addition to discrete words, look for idioms, phrasal verbs and any catchy expressions in your everyday reading to note down in the register and the pocket book.

7. Build your stock of common English prefixes and roots.

8. Master the Academic Word List and regularly take some of the numerous free online tests to check your vocabulary growth.   

9. Deliberately put your vocabulary into practice in the essays you write. 

10. Borrow, buy or steal (ok, I am kidding!) one of the following books and read it from time to time. 

a. Webster's New Word Power Vocabulary.

b. 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary by Dan Strutzel.

c. Instant Vocabulary by Ida Ehlrich.

Unexpected essay topic on exam day: now what?

Knowing that the statistics of failure (over 90%) in the CSS Essay examination put the odds against them, students come to the examination room well-prepared. Or so they think. 

One obvious reason for failure is that they cannot possibly prepare for all topics under the sun. And so on exam day, many CSS aspirants are forced to choose between a rock (difficult topic X) and a hard place (difficult topic Y). I have addressed this decision challenge on this blog in detail with a helpful flowchart.  

Here, I just want to share a few techniques to get your juices flowing after you have chosen the essay prompt. 

1. Brainstorm: Using a spidergram, think quickly on paper in point form, without filtering your ideas or worrying about grammar or even language (yes, you can brainstorm in your native language!).

The spidergram format is more helpful by design than the list format because it allows your ideas to grow organically. Using different ink colours (for different ideas) and pictures (instead of just words) is known as mind-mapping. Research suggests mind-mapping can be more creative and productive than simple brainstorming. 

2. Freewriting: Give yourself 5-10 minutes to write continuously on a topic. Again, don't worry about the conventions of language. The only rule is that you write as much as you can without stopping at all. After you have done that, ask yourself: Is there a pattern in the writeup — a recurring theme, a promising idea, a lead that you could pick up?

3. Ask yourself all the WH-questions about the topic: How?Where? When? Why? What? Who/whom/whose? Park the answers to the relevant questions around the spidergram. 

4. Use Edward de Bono's six thinking hats to brood over the topic.

Of course outside the examination setting there are plenty of other ways to generate ideas but you are in the examination room. Tick tock! Tick Tock!

A paragraph or three about paragraphing

In any essay longer than one paragraph, paragraphing is the decision to end the sentence mid-line, almost always to start a new block of writing (another paragraph) from a fresh line. The 'almost' in the last sentence is to accommodate the very last paragraph of the essay, to which the second half of the definition of paragraphing obviously doesn't apply. 

Now a paragraph performs certain well-defined functions. One, it may convey a new idea or a major development of an idea that has already been presented. Two, it may bridge distinct lines of reasoning, signalling a transition or shift from one way of thinking to another. Three, a paragraph (as in the case of the opening or closing of the essay) may have a strategic function. In the case of the essay opener, the goal is not only to situate the topic and plant the thesis but crucially to grab the attention of the reader. Similarly, the closing paragraph aims to wind the topic down to a graceful halt but also looks to leave a lingering appeal.

Indented, justified

Flush left, justified

In addition to being mindful of why you want to end one paragraph or start another, there are also a few simple tips about the mechanics of paragraphing.  If you are going to indent your paragraphs, indent all but the first paragraph. Try to keep the size of indentation consistent throughout the essay, say, the width of your forefinger. It is perfectly fine however to start all paragraphs, flush left. 'Justifying' i.e. writing within column borders on both sides of the page (as in a newspaper) is also a smart practice. And yes, leave one line blank between paragraphs. The upshot of all this advice is that paragraphing is intended to facilitate the reader. If you do it right, your essay will be easier to bite, chew and digest.     

Précis writing in a nutshell

Much ado is made about the difference between a précis and a summary. It is said that while both are brief, a précis—as the word itself suggests—is more precise or exact in matching the language and structure of the original passage (and so less brief), while the summary is more interpretive and freer. 

For CSS students however, these differences are minutiae that can be safely set aside. 

The nitty-gritty of summary writing is identical to that of the précis writing process.

1. Locate the central idea or the thesis. 

2. Distill each paragraph down to one point (maybe a single phrase or even a complex sentence).

3. Figure out how each paragraph point is related to the thesis. For each paragraph, ask: Is the paragraph about a cause or factor that motivates or explains the thesis? Is it an effect or outcome of the thesis claim? Is it an aspect, sign or manifestation of the central idea? And so forth. 

4. Connect these paragraph points into relation clusters: For example, all paragraph points that express a cause should be lumped together. 

5. Rewrite the original passage in your own words, with the help of (1) and (4).      

How long should your CSS essay be?

I think Sir Francis Bacon, the father of the English essay, would probably have failed the CSS Essay Exam, if he had left the exam room filling just three pages of the answer book with his signature pithy prose. Doubtless even one page of Baconian prose is a powder keg of wit, wisdom and wisecracks. But remember the CSS Essay is not intended to measure your intellectual erudition or literary brilliance.

It is aimed at assessing your ability to present your point of view on a topic coherently, comprehensively and compellingly. That entails some expectations about structure and detail. 

The essay must conform to a recognisable essay architecture and include sufficient and satisfactory resources in its support. 

True, both these conditions could be met in a one pager. However, there is a reason why you are allowed three hours to write the essay. 

Also, remember the CSS  Essay is part of a competition, and the length of the essay you produce will invariably get compared to the average length of a typical essay the examiner is evaluating. 

Many successful students recommend the 5000-word mark as the gold standard. 

I personally think this figure is on the higher side. Realistically speaking, if you are able to churn out even 4000 words of coherent and compelling prose in the CSS examination room, you have good reason to keep your chin up.              

The proof of the essay is in the evidence

Sometimes people ask a deceptively simple question about things. It goes something like this: What is the most important piece of X? What is the most vital organ of the human body? What is the most critical component in a motor car? What is the most important part of an essay?

All such questions have the same answer: It depends! Every piece is important in its own way. You need the engine to drive the car forward but without the nuts on the wheel you can't get the vehicle go very far. Likewise, the brain and the heart matter obviously more than most organs in particular ways, but you need teeth to grind the food and nose hair to filter the dusty air you breathe, and through a complicated chain of relations, the teeth and the nose hair enable the brain and the heart to receive the energy they need to function. 

The same is true for the essay. The thesis of the essay is at the heart of the essay. But unless you feed the essay with concrete and varied evidence, the essay will have no life. 

To repeat, the supporting evidence must at once be specific (e.g. quotations, examples, stories and facts) and diverse (e.g. not all quotes or just stories).      

Types of essay purpose

Broadly speaking, formal written communication is classified into four blanket categories according to purpose. Exposition is any writing that seeks to simplify a complex subject, fill gaps of understanding or analyse a problem. Descriptive writing sets out to present the features or characteristics of a person, place, object or even an abstract entity. Narrative writing relates a sequence of events or a step-by-step process that unfolds over time. Persuasion looks to impress on the readers the significance of an issue, change their opinion, or mobilize action. 

An essay must have a single primary purpose. That does not preclude the possibility of drawing on other modes of communication. If your essay thesis is persuasive in purpose—let’s say you want to convince the reader that the solution to the water crisis in Pakistan that you are offering is the most effective solution—you can still make use of explanatory, descriptive and narrative resources. If, however, the use of any of these resources becomes over-blown to the point of blurring the core essay purpose itself, that’s a problem.

How to write faster under examination pressure

In the examination setting where you have to write your essay to a certain word limit (say, 4000 words) and you have to do so against the clock, you will need plenty of writing stamina. That comes with practice.

While thinking and writing are deeply intermeshed activities, research tells us that the mind can focus well on a single activity at a time. That means the mechanics of good handwriting should be automated with practice.

Gradually lengthen your time trial practice sessions to achieve the desirable level of legibility, regularity and consistency of writing style, while your mental focus is 100% on the thinking process for the duration of the actual examination time limit.

When you are writing, your hand, arm and shoulder become a sophisticated orchestra of dozens of bones and muscles. Good writing technique redirects the effort of fingers and the wrist to the forearm and the shoulder. A good posture—back support, feet on the ground and knees at about 90˚ with plenty of leg room—facilitates the efficiency of the writing hand.

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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