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Dr.Vipin Sharma,IAS

(C.S.Exam.2004)

   As you all are aware, there is an Essay paper in CS (Main) Exam of 200 marks. This paper is very important as it is possible to score 120 or more marks in essay and thus, essay can act as a buffer to your performance in GS and Optional. Candidates, who have appeared in CS (Main) Exam once or more and could not finally make it, very often complain that in spite of writing very good essay to the best of their ability, they got poor scores in range of 85-115/200. It clearly shows that they hold essay as a culprit for their poor overall scores.

                     For the benefit of all, once again, I am hereby reproducing the title from CS (Main) Exam Essay Question Paper, which reads as under:-

          “Examiner will pay special attention to :

I)             Candidate’s grasp of material

II)            Its relevance to the topic chosen

III)          His ability to think constructively

IV)          His ability to present his ideas logically and effectively

V)             His ability to present his ideas concisely”

These points are self explanatory and therefore require no discussion here. Now, before proceeding further, if I may put a question to readers “How many of aspirants have actually read this title with some understanding of what the examiner looks for in as essay in CSE”? And I can tell from my personal experience that very few would have an answer in affirmative.

World Limit and Time Management :-

  There is no UPSC prescribed word limit for essay paper. Going by the 200 marks allotted to essay, it can be presumed that 2000 words should be the word limit. But I recommend and strongly so, that ideal word limit for a quality essay should be 1200 +/- 300 words i.e., 900-1500 words. Not less than 900 as you would not be able to cover many aspects of topic and not more than 1500 as it becomes more and more difficult to retain quality after 1500 words.

Now, coming to time-management, UPSC gives 180 minutes for essay paper. Going by the recommended word limit ( 1200 +/- 300 words), I recommend that you devote 110-120 minutes to develop the essay on 3-4 rough pages at the back of  your answer booklet and roughly 60-70 minutes to actually write down a neat 900-1500 worded essay. And believe me, in 120 minutes, you can develop a very high quality essay on virtually any topic, provided you stop thinking in a narrow, constricted and skewed manner.

What are the steps in essay-writing in CSE ?

    I.      Selecting the topic.

                                     II.      Enumerating various aspects of the topic.

                                     III.      Finding out supporting illustrations, examples, statements etc. for all these aspects.

                                     IV.      Integrating various aspects organically and logically.

                                     V.      Winding up.

Now, let us deal with each of these steps in the backdrop of above statement “Examiner will pay special attention to ……….”

  Step I :- Selecting the topic

I am not for a divide between general topics and philosophical topics. What I suggest is that –

i)   Read the Hindi translation of the topics (Must). Sometimes, this makes more sense than only reading topics in English. As you know, each UPSC question paper is bilingual.

ii)  Spend 8-10 minutes on each topic in the process of developing steps II and III above.

iii)                           Choose the topic for which you can think of maximum aspects and maximum supporting illustrations, facts, examples and statements etc.

  This whole exercise should be completed in about 50 minutes. At the end of this exercise, you will naturally be left with only one topic to write essay on, whether it be a philosophical topic or technical topic or any other general topic.

  Step II and III :- Enumerating various aspect of the topic along with supporting statements

Once you decide your essay topic in 50 minutes, the steps II and III should be completed in 30 more minutes, bringing the total time consumed to 50 minutes ( for step I) + 30 minutes ( for steps II and III) = 80 minutes.

Steps II and III are to be undertaken simultaneously and not separately, as aspect without supporting example does not impress the examiner and examples without relevant aspect do not actually make sense. While you were choosing your topic (Step-I) in initial 50 minutes, you must have written down some aspect and examples of chosen topic. Now in these 30 minutes, write down as many aspect and supporting illustrations as you can. A good quality essay must have at least 5-8 aspects and 10-15 illustrations to support these aspects.

AND DO NOT PERFORM STEPS I, II  and III  ORALLY OR IN YOUR MIND ONLY, WHATEVER COMES TO YOUR MIND DURING STEPS I – III, WRITE DOWN AT THE BACK PAGES OF YOUR ANSWER BOOKLET AND SUPER SCRIBE THESE PAGES AS “ROUGH WORK” IN BOLD LETTERS. DO CROSS THESE PAGES ONCE YOU HAVE FINISHED WRITING YOUR ESSAY.

Examiner will definitely look at these pages to get an idea of how you have developed your essay and this will affect your total essay score also.

Step IV :- Integrating various aspects and supporting illustrations organically and logically

 If qualitative 80 minutes have been spent by you up to step III, then this step IV should not consume more than 5-10 minutes of yours. Take care to write the essay in such a manner that all aspects and supporting illustrations of the topic flow out naturally and effortlessly, one after the other and not in a discorded or broken manner. Up to step IV, you have thus consumed 90 minutes i.e., half time.

  Step V :- Winding - Up

Winding-up requires 10 minutes of careful thinking and a 100-150 words write-up, which is a part of overall word limit of 900-1500 words and not separate. Whatever be the topic, winding-up must be on an optimistic note with certain novel suggestions from your side, if you can think of some.

Thus in 100 minutes, your essay should be ready.

  What now after steps I to V are complete :-

Don’t jump start at writing essay now. Take a break, have a glass of water, take a walk to the toilet, see here and there, relax. Spend at least 5 minutes on this. That takes total time consumed to 105 minutes.

  Review of what you have done so far :-

After this 5 minutes break, start thinking again. See what you have written. You might recall another aspect of the topic or some other illustrations to support existing or never aspects of the topic. Include that too in your draft. Read your draft essay once more.

This review exercise should take at least 10 minutes, taking total time consumed to 115 minutes.

Actual writing of essay :-

Now you start writing essay in neat handwriting and for this, you have 65 minutes, which are fairly sufficient to write 1500 words. While actually writing, you can add more aspects or illustrations, if you recall, but do not disturb the draft much. If you confine to 1500 words’ limit, you should usually not require a supplementary answer book, but if required, go for one and securely attach to main answer book in last 2 minutes.

This finishes the crux of our discussion here. Before I wind-up, here are some “do nots” in essay:-

DO NOT

I)                Condemn Constitution, Government Policies and Court decisions, unless you have an authentic source for this to draw from

II)           Give regional / religious / communal fervors to your essay. The examiner should not be able to judge after reading your essay that which part of India you come from and which religion / community you belong to .

III)          Exceed word limit of 1500 words, as far as possible.

IV)           End essay on pessimistic note.

V)            Fill your essay with technical facts, jargon and technical knowledge.

  I wish all the reader of this article a very happy essay writing experience and good score in essay papers in CS (Main) Exam.

                                                            (Concluded)

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