Mistake 10

Producing an Incoherent Answer:

One of the worst things you can do to put off the teacher or examiner marking your paper is to write incoherently. That is, your thoughts and ideas are badly expressed and very difficult for the marker to understand. In short, your writing does not make sense.

Imagine that you are the person who has to mark hundreds of test or exam papers. You could be very tired by the time you reach for another paper to mark. Then to your horror, you realise that this particular student’s answers are incoherent. You have to read and re-read each of his or her answers before you understand what he or she is trying to say. Worst of all, you may not even understand what he or she is trying to say!

In situations like this, how would you grade the student’s answers? Would you want to spend more time on his or her other similarly incoherent answers? Probably not.

The thing about incoherent writing is that students who write like that do not realise that only they themselves understand what they are writing about!

The only way to make sure that you do not write incoherently in a test or exam paper is to write more often. Below are the suggested measures:

1. Write an essay on any topic you want.
2. Check through your essay at least twice to make sure that you yourself understand what you are writing.
3. Ask somebody who has a better command of English than you (e.g., your friends, classmates, teachers or family members) to proofread your essays for you. The more persons you can get to proofread your essays, the better.
4. Find out which parts of your essay they have understood and which parts they have difficulty understanding.
5. Ask them how you could have rewritten those parts that they do not understand.
6. Ask yourself whether their suggested rewriting of those parts is easier to understand than what you have written.
7. Discover where you have gone wrong in your initial write-up and try not to repeat such mistakes again in future.
8. Proceed to step 1 above and repeat the process.