The plan before the text

An hour for one text, and its first minutes produce nothing that ends up on the answer sheet. The note paper, the Konzeptpapier, is not marked at all: it cannot add a point and it cannot cost one. The only thing it can cost is minutes, and the question running through this whole article is what you buy with them.

What a plan buys, and what it does not

This little table is needed at every point below, so keep it in view.

The hour does not divide itself, so divide it before you start. A split that works: about 10 minutes to read the post and the task and write the note paper, about 40 to write, and about 10 for the last check, where you count the words and hold the text against the three content points. The plan gets a sixth of the hour, and what it buys is not having to rewrite a paragraph at minute 40.

Content point is what this article calls one of the three task instructions from here on, the ones printed and numbered under the blog post. There are always three, and the first always asks you to summarise the writer's attitude in one sentence.

Point 0: someone else's plan, and what came of it

Here are the post and the task that goes with it. They are the only ones in this article.

"The Cupboard on the Third Floor", by Ines Halvorsen ("ineshalv"), 08/04/2024

Nobody in this building owns a drill any more. Last spring my neighbour emptied an old storage cupboard on the third floor and left her drill in it with a note: borrow it, bring it back. By July there was a ladder, a paint roller and a sewing machine in there. I have used that drill four times and bought nothing.

And yet people keep buying. My brother got a drill of his own in March. He has used it once, and it lives in a box under his bed. Why do we still buy the things we plan to use twice?

The task. 1. summarise Ines's opinion about owning tools in one sentence and comment on it. 2. discuss the reasons why people still buy things they will use once or twice. 3. suggest one rule that would make a shared cupboard work in your building.

And here is somebody's note paper for it, in full. Three lines, written in a minute.

1. Ines is right
2. reasons why people buy
3. rules for the cupboard

What is wrong with it. Lines 2 and 3 are the task, copied out shorter. Line 1 does not say what she is right about. Not one of the three holds a single word that will end up in the text.

A plan like that looks like a plan because it takes up room on the page. It starts working only at minute 40, and then it turns out the content is being invented inside the sentence, one word at a time, while the clock runs.

A plan line that decides nothing

Below are five versions of the same line, the second content point, the one about reasons. All five were written by real hands, and all five fit on the note paper.

The test for a line is simple: cross out everything already on the page, in the task and in the post alike. What is left is your plan. If nothing is left, the line has not been written.

The two usable lines have one thing in common: they were written out of the writer's own life, not out of the task. An argument you already have unfolds into a sentence; an argument you plan to find along the way usually turns out to be the post's own paragraph, retold in your words.

A line can hold content and still lose the point. The next pair breaks somewhere else.

Which is why the task's verb goes first in the plan line: suggest:, reasons:, compare:. Not for decoration, but so that at minute 40 the paragraph is written to the verb that was ordered.

Where the two hundred and fifty words go

Two finished texts now. Both were written, both were handed in, and both have few mistakes.

Notice what did not happen here: the length holds, the language did not let anybody down, the time did not run out. One point was eaten by another, and that is settled only before the first paragraph starts growing.

The extracts below are shortened. A real comment is 250 words; here each paragraph is boiled down to one sentence. A short extract does not train how words spread across three paragraphs; it only shows where the spread has already gone wrong.

Hence a rule that belongs on the note paper as a number: about 70 words beside each of the three lines. The figure is not there to be exact, but so that halfway through the first paragraph you can see that you are already writing at the third one's expense.

The words are shared out, the verbs are in place, and the text can still come apart, only no longer on length.

One position across all three paragraphs

Another boiled-down comment, entirely on topic and without a grammar mistake in it.

A reversal is rarely deliberate. It arrives with an argument that looked interesting and drags a paragraph after it that was written for a different position. On paper it is visible earlier than it is in the text.

The last plan: call it in advance

Now a piece of note paper you have not seen, for the same post about the cupboard. Before it gets taken apart, look at it whole.

1. Ines is right about drills: my flat is 30 m2, nowhere to keep one
2. why people buy: adverts; shops open late; a drill is cheap; asking feels awkward;
   my brother; presents
3. reasons the cupboard in our building stopped working

The second line is a different matter: it does not miss the task, it simply does not fit.

What to take away

The note paper is finished when four things are on it, and none of them copied from the task:

1. Three lines, one per content point, each opening with the task's own verb: summarise:, reasons:, suggest:.
2. In each line, what the task does not say: your own argument, your own example, your own rule. Everything else gets crossed out.
3. One position, written down as a word, with both following lines agreeing with it.
4. A figure beside each line, about 70 words, so the first point does not eat the third.

After that the text itself begins, and other things decide there.

The language itself: what a comment is written with