To write about any simple thing or subject matter, we surely need an idea. If you don’t have an idea about what you want to write, how can you possibly write a full-fledged essay? The result is you will find yourself with two or three lines, but does that make an essay?

Idea - The Nightmare Of Writing!

But the biggest problem which GP essay candidates or any essay writing students face, is actually “how to acquire ideas“. The latter seems to be a daunting task since writing is not like other subjects where success depends upon assimilation of a certain number of facts, theories and the application of principles.

GP Essay Writing Or Essays Go A Step Ahead..

Essay writing transcends the requirement of other subjects by going a step further; it tests the total equipment of the student - his intelligence, his manners, his taste, his common sense, his personal experiences, his observation and his character. Infact, that’s the beauty of GP Essays. It makes you discover yourself and your abilities.

My GP (General Paper) classes have contributed a lot in discovering myself and some hidden skills. Of course, I was just like you, hating to write an essay. But a GP class, is completely different from our common english language class. Unless and until you grasp the true meaning of the purpose of a GP class, you will not really go in the right attitude and direction which contribute a lot to the future of how you will write.

Acquiring Ideas - 3 Steps Only!

1) STEP 1 - Reading

Reading is the most essential means of gaining knowledge. You could argue that listening might be above reading to increase your awareness, you might be right to a lesser extent, why? Just think for a moment, does listening contribute to help you write good english and gain vocabulary? The answer is “no“. When you read you see how words are written and that’s crucial from a proper grammatical point of view.
Reading will help you in two fold:
a) Increase your knowledge (to gain ideas)
b) Increase your vocabulary (to convey your ideas with the right words)

Nowadays, reading opportunities has never been so easy and comfortable. The computer/internet world allows you to read from anywhere and about anything you want. It’s like you are having the whole world’s library in your hand and in “one click”. So, make the most out of it my friend!

Now, you need to be selective in what you read. Spending hours and hours reading a lengthy gossip, for instance, is not desirable. Read quality stuff as opposed to quantity. Some points to note:
i) Always have a good dictionary handy and each time to you stumble across a new word, look for its meaning and write it down. (I recommend the concise Oxford Dictionary)
ii) Read about stuffs that pleases you, but provided you select quality material.
iii) Read a good newspaper from your locality and keep updated. (For example in Mauritius, I recommend ‘News On Sunday’ to all students)
iv) Read to increase your awareness and vocabulary, don’t rush to read a lot of pages like it’s a race.
v) Read with your soul. Put in effort, interest and will. Else you are wasting your time

2) STEP 2 - Observation

What I mean by observation and what you should understand is: observation means ‘to look carefully and diligently for the sole aim of discovering and noting anything that can help you in writing and gaining ideas‘. An active and intelligent mind is always on the lookout since there is something to be learned in everything, however simple it is! You should develop a creative mind. An artist always has this philosophy: “Beauty is found even in ugliness“. Same applies to your observation, you just need to view things at the right angle and with the right frame of mind.

3) STEP 3 - Ask Questions

The most stupid thing to do is to remain an ignorant. In classes, there are so many students who don’t ask questions, either they are shy or they are not interested at all. This is a big mistake. You are compromising the growth of your own knowledge.

Ask questions and challenge answers whenever you feel there is any bias or you have a better answer - that’s how you will progress!

Throughout history, people who have been most famous for their wisdom, have been those who asked questions and sought for answers in all its angle.

Writing The GP Essay

Here’s a list of my previously written article on Writing and GP Essays:
=> Writing the GP Essay - Write to convince!
=> Method For Presentation Of Topics
=> Words You Need To have In A Story Or Essay

For Bloggers

If you are a blogger, you should read this article: Wonderful Blogging Ideas - How To Breed Them In Your Garden?

I just noticed the following message on Entrecard’s main page:

There was a fire at our datacenter resulting in the failure of some of our systems, our database server appears to be offline still, we’re working on it and we’re really sorry about the issues at this time. more information arriving shortly.

Update: The outage is pretty serious, you can read more about the datacenter fire at ThePlanet forums. They’ve got teams of people there and they’re working through the night. We have no ETA at this time, very sorry.

I rushed on ThePlanet forums and the matter sounds a bit serious, here’s some quote of the recent news:

Today at approximately 5:45 p.m., a transformer in our H1 data center in Houston caught fire, thus requiring us to take down all generators as instructed by the fire department. All servers are down.

We are working with the fire department, with our facilities staff on site, to assess the situation.

To keep you updated, we will send messages every 15 minutes in Orbit and here in our forum.

From Doug Erwin:
This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.

We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.

I am sorry that this accident has occurred and I apologize for the impact.

More teams from The Planet are coming along with more contractors from key vendors for electrical and facilities to help get H1 online. At this time, DNS infrastructure continues to propagate. ServerCommand servers are installed, but the teams are making sure all networking is intact and ready. In the meantime, please call our support lines for any issues. Additional support techs are available.

At this time, we do not have an updated Estimated Time to repair. Please continue following this thread for updates.

—–
Urvish Vashi
Director, Product Management
The Planet

For more news, visit the ThePlanet forums

Let’s hope everything gets back to normal soon and Entrecard comes back.

UPDATED: Entrecard is now back :)