The Essay Prompt
You are sitting a written communication task. You are given the statement: "A society that prizes efficiency above all else will eventually find itself efficient at things that do not matter." You have 30 minutes to write a response of roughly 600 words. You have no source material and may draw on any examples you know. Two other candidates in the room take different approaches. Candidate A writes a tightly argued essay defining efficiency, conceding its value in medicine and logistics, then arguing that the statement overstates the case because efficiency frees resources for things that do matter. Candidate B writes a personal narrative about a family business that was ruined by cost-cutting, with little explicit argument and no definition of terms.
1. Analyse what distinguishes a strong response to this prompt from a weak one, using the two candidates as illustrations.
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The prompt is an aphorism, not a proposition with fixed meaning. The strongest responses do three things: they unpack the key terms, they take a position, and they test the position against a case that could have gone the other way.
Candidate A does all three. Defining efficiency early matters because the statement trades on an ambiguity - efficiency as technical ratio (outputs per input) versus efficiency as a social priority. A concedes the first and interrogates the second. Crucially, A engages with the strongest version of the opposing view: that efficiency in medicine or logistics is not a distraction from what matters but a precondition for it. That concession strengthens rather than weakens the essay, because it shows the writer is arguing with a real opponent rather than a straw man.
Candidate B's narrative may be vivid, but it substitutes illustration for argument. A single family business cannot establish a claim about societies, and without defining efficiency the reader cannot tell whether the cost-cutting described was efficiency at all - it may simply have been short-termism. The essay risks becoming a story with a moral attached rather than reasoning.
The distinction is not 'formal versus personal'. A personal example can be powerful if it is used as evidence within an argument. The weakness is the absence of a claim that could be contested.
2. Candidate B's narrative is emotionally engaging. Argue for or against the view that emotional engagement is a legitimate strength in this task.
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Emotional engagement is legitimate, but only when it serves the argument rather than replacing it.
The case for it is real. Written communication is assessed partly on whether the reader is persuaded, and dry abstraction rarely persuades. A concrete human consequence - a family losing a business - makes an abstract claim about misplaced priorities vivid and memorable. Examiners are readers, and a reader who feels the stakes is more likely to follow a difficult argument. Emotion can also do argumentative work: it signals that the writer has weighed the human cost, not merely calculated it.
The case against is that emotion is easy to simulate and hard to verify. A narrative can move a reader while committing logical errors - generalising from one case, assuming causation, ignoring that the cost-cutting might have been inefficient rather than efficient. If the reader is moved past the point of asking whether the example supports the claim, the emotion has done harm.
The resolution is that emotional engagement should be earned by argument, not substituted for it. Candidate B could keep the family business and still succeed by using it to test a definition: was the cost-cutting genuinely efficient, or merely cheap? That question turns a story into an argument, and the emotion then reinforces rather than obscures the reasoning.