English for UP PCS-J
The English paper tests usage rather than literary criticism: grammar and usage, comprehension, vocabulary, idioms, sentence improvement, paragraph ordering, précis, and translation from Hindi into English. As a scoring and filtering paper, accuracy in short items matters more than ambitious prose.
Core rules
- Agreement: the verb follows the subject, not the nearest noun - "One of the accused was acquitted."
- Prepositions with legal verbs: charged with, convicted of, acquitted of, accused of, liable for, entitled to, deprived of.
- Reported speech: shift the tense back one step unless the reporting verb is in the present.
- Register: avoid contractions, slang and Indianisms such as "discuss about", "return back", "cope up with".
Worked example
Improve: "The accused was acquitted from the charge of murder, but convicted for theft."
There are two preposition errors. "Acquitted" takes of, and "convicted" also takes of, not for. Corrected: "The accused was acquitted of the charge of murder but convicted of theft." The reasoning is collocation, not meaning - both versions are understandable, but only one is idiomatic English.
Traps
- Confusing comprise (the whole comprises the parts) with compose (parts compose the whole).
- Double comparatives and double negatives - "more better", "did not do nothing".
- Latin terms: prima facie (on the face of it), mens rea (guilty mind), actus reus (guilty act), res judicata (a matter already adjudged). Never swap mens rea and actus reus.
- In précis, lifting whole sentences instead of condensing them into your own words.