School Days – How to write a perfect essay

Thanks to the drilling of Rev Br Shannon, within a few weeks our whole class gradually learnt the art of how to pen a near-perfect essay.
His instructions were clear – devote at least the first 15 minutes to gather your thoughts and recollect any small thing that would be relevant to the essay. Then plan the different parts of essay – namely, the introduction followed by the main body and then the conclusion.

The essay could be on any subject under the Sun and you must, therefore, be prepared to pen your thoughts without any hesitation. And – believe it or not – he gave us topics like ‘Keeping house when mother is ill’ or ‘the day everything went wrong.’
He would advise us to study materials apart from the school books and suggested that we browse through the daily newspapers to keep abreast of happenings around us. To him, the best newspaper for doing that in Kolkata was The Statesman – in the 1950s.
He taught us to remember to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and would always remind us to keep at least 15 minutes in hand for revision.
He was not satisfied to just issue the directives but would go on to ensure that we got addicted to the habit – on Fridays it was Essay Time. He would write the subject on the blackboard and we had to keep our pens on the desk and wait for 15 minutes before we could begin to write. (to be continued…)
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