The Letter That Says Nothing
Rohan, a Class XII student of a government high school in Cuttack, must write a letter to the editor of an English daily in 150-200 words about the dumping of garbage beside his school gate. The facts he has are these: the municipal bin was removed three months ago; roughly 200 households now dump waste on the road; six dengue cases were reported in the school's neighbourhood last month; the school has 900 students. The item carries 10 marks, 4 for format and 6 for content and expression. His draft opens: 'Hi Editor, I want to say that our area is very dirty and it is a big problem for all of us students.' It ends: 'Yours lovingly, Rohan.' The body is 260 words of general complaint - 'we should keep our environment clean', 'trees are our friends' - with no dates, numbers or requests. He believes that a longer, more emotional letter must be worth more marks.
1. Identify the format and register faults in his opening and closing, and supply corrected lines.
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Four faults are visible in the two lines alone:
- Salutation. 'Hi Editor' is conversational. A formal letter to a newspaper opens 'The Editor, The Samaj' followed by the city, or 'Sir/Madam' after the address block, depending on the format your textbook prescribes.
- No subject line. A one-line subject ('Subject: Garbage dumping near government high school gate - urgent action needed') tells the editor what the letter is about and shows control.
- Closing. 'Yours lovingly' belongs to letters to family. The pairing rule is: Dear Sir/Madam takes Yours faithfully; Dear Mr Mohanty takes Yours sincerely.
- Missing sender's address and date, which format marks usually include.
Corrected opening: 'Sir, I wish to draw the attention of the authorities to a serious public-health problem outside the gate of our school.' Corrected closing: 'Yours faithfully, Rohan Das, Class XII, Government High School, Cuttack.' Note that the correction is not decoration - the salutation and closing are themselves assessed items.
2. Rewrite the first two body sentences using his facts, and explain why this version earns content marks where his does not.
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Rewrite: 'The municipal bin outside our school gate was removed in the first week of June. Since then, roughly 200 households have been dumping waste on the road, and last month six dengue cases were reported in the neighbourhood of our school, which has 900 students.'
Why this scores: every clause is checkable. A date ('first week of June'), a quantity (200 households), a number of cases (six) and an affected population (900 students) do three jobs at once - they prove the writer has information rather than indignation, they establish urgency, and they give the editor something that can be printed or verified. His sentences, by contrast, could be written about any street in any town; they contain no fact that an editor could act on, so the examiner has nothing to reward beyond grammar.
A useful test for content: cover the place name and ask whether the sentence could belong to another letter. If yes, it is filler.
3. His body is 260 words and must come down to about 180. State the criteria he should use to decide what to cut and what to keep.
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Cut by function, not by length.
Keep: the problem in one sentence, the dated facts (bin removed, 200 households, six dengue cases, 900 students), and a specific request ('restore the bin and arrange collection twice a week').
Cut: general truths that need no writer - 'we should keep our environment clean', 'trees are our friends', 'health is wealth'. These are the first casualties because they carry no local information and are the most common form of padding. Second to go are repeated complaints that restate the problem in new words.
Compress, don't delete: the emotional sentence about children walking past the dump can survive as one clause ('students pass it twice a day') rather than three sentences.
He should also check the count after cutting: 150-200 means 150-200, and a 240-word letter can lose marks even if the English is good. Aim for 175 and leave a margin.