Many say writing is an art. But for those who do/did Engineering writing is always fun. Semester is all about learning how to write rather than what to write. It gives you confidence to write anything out of nothing. You get to see different people using different techniques to score marks with the default being using Black stick + Handwriting + 30 pages of writing.


This post showcases few techniques used by my friends who made engineering writing easy for me.

DISCLAIMER : Trying out the mentioned methods may/may not work out in all colleges.

1. Seek Time Algorithm :

Simple and straight forward. This algorithm states that, "Don't see the question papers as a paper containing set of questions, its just a set of statements in English to which all rules of grammar are applicable".

It is up to you to derive the answers from the question. There are many variations of this algorithm, but as per the developer's suggestion active to passive voice conversion yields better results. Below is the real implementation of this for a 2 mark question which got complete 2 marks.

Q : What is Seek Time ?

A: The time required to seek is called Seek Time.

Q: What is one transaction ?

A: The difference between two transaction is called one transaction.

2. Padatha Podu Peter ah vidu :

As you can guess from the name , the talent lies in the way how you present it. For starters who doesn't know this, just memorize all the diagrams in the chapter and the rest of the answer is left to your imagination.

Little intro about someone who is extremely talented at this. Jeya Kumar , someone who never studies but scores always above 80 percent. It was misunderstood that he was a good listener in class. The truth was uncovered in 3rd year during one of the story telling sessions where Mr.Jeya Kumar was trying to explain the OS concept of Tunneling.

[Jai if you are reading this, I googled a lot to get this picture]

Just imagine how would it be on the previous day of exam, with a lot of portions left to cover, trusting somone like Jai would help covering a few topics, he explains the following

"Diagram ah podu machan, Car varuthu, Thannikulla poguthu, Thannila irunthu veliya vanthuruchu, Ullara ethachum eluthiko"

["Draw the diagram machi, Car comes, enters the water, comes out of the water, write something along with this"]

To the worst he is named the only padikara pullai of our class.

3. Wall Following Method:

One of the weirdest method I have ever witnessed. Balaji is the only one who has this unique talent or should I say behavior, during semesters. He chooses a wall, preferably the one close to him, makes sure he gets his position right, then starts turning the pages to the speed of the wind. Anyone who enters the room can find him in the same position at anytime. Too much of disturbances, he chooses some other wall to follow in some other room. Weird isn't? But still he tops in semesters and hence this method works.

4. Convince or confuse:

We call it the GOD FATHER technique, unanimously the best.
Given a question, there might be three possible scenarios

1. You know the question & answer.
2. You know the question but not the answer.
3. You don't know both.


But people gifted with this talent doesn't care about the above. All they need is a few words to play with. You start filling up the paper with most confusing words accompanied by convincing handwriting. Answers with a bad handwriting is just like T.R with his African music. People with this talent can write scalable answers, ranging from a single page till entire sheet.

P.S : Thanks to Balaji for bringing the unit test papers to hostel, without which this post wouldn't have been possible at all. Also to Gokul, the only person to have a digicam so that the pics are of better quality.

Cheers,
Prem.

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