Answer writing for upsc mains ias civil services

The writing style is as important as study in mains. Most of the aspirants study loads of info for mains. I have seen guys who would refer every crazy book ever written on a subject. There are guys who subscribe to every magazine on news stand. Many of them end as walking wikipedias but don’t get selected to civils, due to wrong writing style.

Answer ‘the’ question

Answer what is being asked and not what you know. Educationists constantly remind the students of this in their classes. The reason being: Most students tend to write what they know, but fail to transform information into “what is being asked”. Thus ‘explain’ becomes ‘critical analyses, and ‘write short notes’ becomes ‘long answers’. The error in length, content and context is a common error.

Flow

The answer must have a certain amount of flow while being read. How would it sound if a rock song is mixed intermittently with classical music?. Many of answers we write would be like that. The natural flow of thought, a good order etc is needed. This is a difficult thing to achieve. Since we write the answer, we feel a flow in it. The person who reads it must feel it.

Adding colors to your answer

Pictures,Diagrams, depictions, underlining etc add color to the answer. A picture is worth thousand words. Adding pictures, diagrams etc will add value to your paper.

An easy way is using flow diagrams/charts. I found that flow diagrams have 2 benefits. One it consumes lot of space! So my paper would weight equal as other prolific writers. It’s easy to draw and easy to digest for the respected person who values my paper.

Underlining is to highlight the areas we know. This is especially good when gasification is done. The underlining is done to show that we got some solid points along with the gas. If we don’t underline it, the reader may miss it.

 

stages of answer writing