Twenty-Five Minutes and a Letter That Is 80 Words Too Long
In the writing section a candidate has 25 minutes and two options: a 150-word formal letter to the Headmaster requesting a duplicate mark sheet, or a 200-word essay on விளையாட்டின் பயன்கள். He chooses the letter because he thinks it is shorter. He writes 230 words. It opens 'வணக்கம் சார்!', carries no date and no sender address, and closes 'நன்றி, ரமேஷ்'. For the request itself he writes 'உடனே அனுப்பிவிடுங்கள்'. He spends the last four minutes adding another paragraph about how important the mark sheet is for his college application. He expects full marks because, as he puts it, 'everything they asked for is in there'.
1. Was choosing the letter over the essay the right decision? Justify with reference to marks, time and risk.
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The decision is right, but for a better reason than length. A formal letter is a closed format: the required elements are known in advance and each one is checkable, so the answer is largely a compliance task with a small content core. An essay on விளையாட்டின் பயன்கள் is open: it demands three or four developed points, transitions and a conclusion, and under time pressure an open task degrades faster than a closed one. So the letter is the lower-variance choice. What he got wrong was the time model. He assumed 150 words is quicker to produce than 200, but a formal letter needs planning of its format, and format errors cost marks that extra content cannot recover. Twenty-five minutes should be split as 3 minutes of format skeleton, 18 minutes of writing, 4 minutes of checking addresses, date, subject line and verb forms. The extra paragraph he added at the end earned nothing and consumed the checking time.
2. List the format elements an examiner will look for, and identify which of his omissions are cheapest to fix.
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A formal Tamil letter in this register normally carries: sender's address, date, receiver's designation and address, a subject line, a formal salutation, the body in paragraphs, a formal subscription, and the signature with the sender's name. His omissions are the date, the sender's address, the receiver's address and the subject line. These are the cheapest possible marks because they are fixed strings: the skeleton can be written in under two minutes before any thought about content. The order of severity is: missing salutation register and missing subscription first, because they signal that he does not know the register at all; then missing date and addresses, which signal carelessness; then the subject line, which is a convention rather than a grammatical requirement. Note also that 'நன்றி, ரமேஷ்' is a chat closing, not a formal subscription, so fixing the closing is worth more than adding a paragraph.
3. Convert his three problematic expressions into acceptable formal equivalents, and state the principle behind each change.
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'வணக்கம் சார்' becomes 'மதிப்பிற்குரிய ஐயா' or 'அய்யா'. The principle is that a formal letter opens with a title of respect appropriate to the addressee's position, not a conversational greeting; சார் is acceptable in speech but too casual for a written petition. 'உடனே அனுப்பிவிடுங்கள்' becomes 'உடனடியாக அனுப்பித் தருமாறு கேட்டுக்கொள்கிறேன்'. The principle is mood and person: the imperative addressed to a superior sounds like a command, and a request in the first person with the honorific infinitive is the standard polite form. 'நன்றி, ரமேஷ்' becomes 'இப்படிக்கு, தங்கள் மாணவன், ரமேஷ்'. The principle is that the subscription states the relationship and the signature states the name; நன்றி alone belongs to informal notes. The general rule: in a formal letter the writer never gives orders and never addresses the reader as an equal.