Thirty Words and Fifty-Five Minutes
In the descriptive paper you have 55 minutes left and two questions: a précis of 30 words (±2) carrying 15 marks, and an essay of 250–300 words carrying 25 marks. The passage to be summarised reads: 'Flood forecasting in India has improved steadily, but warnings still arrive as statistics rather than instructions. A gauge reading of 84,000 cusecs at a barrage means very little to a family in a low-lying hamlet; "leave by 6 p.m., carry your documents, take the cattle to the embankment road" means everything. The failure is rarely in the instrument. It lies in the last mile, where a warning must be turned into a specific action, for a specific household, at a specific hour. Until that translation happens, every advance in satellite telemetry will remain an advance in measurement, not in safety.' The paper instructs that the précis must not lift phrases from the passage and that both answers must be in your own words.
1. Write the précis within the limit, and justify what you retained, what you discarded, and each distinctive phrase you had to paraphrase.
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Précis (27 words):
'India forecasts floods better now, but its alerts give measurements instead of telling a particular household what to do, and when. Better instruments alone cannot save lives.'
What I retained - the argument's skeleton, nothing else.
- The concession: forecasting has improved. Drop it and the précis becomes a complaint rather than an assessment.
- The diagnosis: alerts deliver measurements, not instructions. This is the passage's central claim.
- The conclusion: instruments alone cannot save lives. This is the reason the précis exists.
What I discarded as illustration, not idea.
- The figure 84,000 cusecs. It is an example of a measurement; the précis states the category, not the instance.
- The evacuation sentence ('leave by 6 p.m., carry your documents, take the cattle'). It is the illustration of an instruction, and at 20 words it would consume two-thirds of the allowance.
Phrases I had to recast, and why.
- 'the last mile' - a distinctive metaphor; replaced by 'its alerts', which carries the meaning without borrowing the wording.
- 'satellite telemetry' - too specific for the general claim; replaced by 'instruments'.
- 'statistics rather than instructions' - retained as a contrast but rebuilt as 'measurements instead of telling...', which also absorbs the passage's 'specific household, specific hour' into 'what to do, and when'.
Count discipline: 27 words sits inside 28–32, leaving room to add one word if a marker prefers 'flood alerts' to 'alerts'.
2. Allocate the 55 minutes between the two answers and defend the allocation.
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Allocation: précis 20 minutes; essay 34 minutes; 1 minute contingency.
Précis (20 minutes): 4 minutes reading the passage and marking its three load-bearing sentences, 11 minutes drafting and counting, 5 minutes replacing lifted phrases and re-counting. The re-count is not optional: the limit is 28–32 words, and an over-length précis loses marks mechanically, however good the prose.
Essay (34 minutes): 5 minutes outline (thesis, three body points, conclusion), 26 minutes writing, 3 minutes checking. 250–300 words at a realistic 10–12 words a minute of composed prose is 25–30 minutes of writing alone; anything less than 26 minutes of writing time forces a short answer, and a short answer loses marks on both content and length.
Why not split evenly (27.5/27.5)? Because marks, not questions, set the price. The essay carries 25 of 40 marks; spending equal time on a 15-mark answer caps your return at 15 no matter how polished it is. A minute moved from the précis to the essay earns more, up to the point where the précis becomes careless - hence 20 minutes, not 12.
Why not starve the précis further? A précis is the higher-risk answer per minute: it has a hard word limit, a ban on lifted phrasing, and no room to recover from a misread. Fifteen minutes is the floor at which the passage can actually be read twice.
One deliberate trade: if the essay outline is not settled by minute 40 of the paper, write it anyway and keep the conclusion short. An essay with a weak conclusion still scores on structure; an essay with no conclusion loses a block of marks outright.