Pitfalls, Clichés and Common Errors

Every cycle, the same handful of stylistic faults appear across thousands of scripts. They are easy to fix in cold review; almost impossible to fix mid-flow if you have not trained yourself out of them. This lesson catalogues the most damaging.

The cliché problem

A cliché is a phrase whose original force has been worn flat by repetition. Examiners flag clichés because they signal that the candidate is reaching for a stock expression rather than constructing one.

Strike each of these from your active vocabulary now. They are unredeemable.

Inflation and pomposity

Pakistani academic English carries a tradition of formality borrowed from colonial-era prose. It survives in coaching academy templates and ruins thousands of essays each year. Examples:

Inflated	Plain
"It is pertinent to mention here that…"	"Notably," or simply delete the phrase
"It is a matter of utmost importance that…"	"Crucially,"
"Owing to the prevalence of the aforesaid issues…"	"Because of these problems,"
"The government has formulated a multitude of policies in the said domain…"	"The government has tried several policies here…"
"It cannot be denied that the role of education is of paramount significance…"	"Education matters."

Read each of your paragraphs and ask: would a careful editor cut three words from this sentence without losing meaning? If yes, cut them yourself before the examiner does.

Generalities and abstraction

A second sin is the substitution of abstract gestures for concrete claims. Examiners notice abstraction immediately because they have read it ten thousand times.

Education is the backbone of every nation. Without education, no country can progress. It is the duty of every government to provide quality education to its people.

These three sentences say nothing the examiner does not already accept. Compare:

Pakistan's public spending on education has remained below 2% of GDP for two decades — well under the South Asian average of 4% and the SDG-4 benchmark of 6%. The consequences are visible in the National Achievement Test 2023, where a Grade 8 cohort in Punjab scored 36% in mathematics. Until the spending–outcome gap is closed, no industrial policy will find the workforce it needs.

The second passage does work. The first only signals that the candidate has thought about the topic.

Grammar errors that hurt the most

The five most common errors in CSS scripts, in roughly descending order of frequency:

1. Article misuse

Pakistani English drops or adds articles where Standard English does the reverse.

• Wrong: "He is going to office." — Right: "He is going to the office."
• Wrong: "The corruption is rampant." — Right: "Corruption is rampant."
• Wrong: "He is teacher in our school." — Right: "He is a teacher in our school."

2. Subject-verb agreement with compound subjects

• Wrong: "The growth of exports and remittances are encouraging."
• Right: "The growth of exports and remittances is encouraging." (Subject is growth, singular.)

3. Dangling modifiers

• Wrong: "Walking down the street, the heat was unbearable."
• Right: "Walking down the street, I found the heat unbearable."

4. Mixed tenses within a paragraph

If you begin a paragraph in the present tense ("Pakistan faces…"), do not drift into the past ("…and the government tried…") without a clear reason. Set a primary tense per paragraph and stay there.

5. Comma splices

• Wrong: "The economy is fragile, the rupee is depreciating."
• Right: "The economy is fragile; the rupee is depreciating." — or split into two sentences, or use a coordinating conjunction.

False emphasis devices

Some habits weaken prose rather than strengthening it:

• Capitalising for emphasis ("EDUCATION is important.") — never.
• Exclamation marks ("This is alarming!") — never in a formal essay.
• Italics for emphasis — sparingly, if at all; in a handwritten script, irrelevant.
• Rhetorical questions stacked together — one well-placed question can frame a section; five in a row signal that the writer is searching for content.
• Quotations longer than two lines — almost always trim. The examiner can identify long block quotations as padding.

The Urdu-to-English drag

A specific stylistic risk for Pakistani candidates is the literal translation of Urdu sentence patterns into English. Common symptoms:

Urdu-pattern English	Standard English
"It is the matter of pride for us that…"	"We can take pride in the fact that…"
"He gave the speech with full passion."	"He spoke passionately."
"Government should keep an eye on this issue."	"The government should monitor this issue."
"This is the high time we awake from sleep."	"It is high time we acted."

Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

A final discipline

In the review phase of the exam, read every paragraph once specifically for clichés, once for grammar, once for verb strength. Three quick passes catch most of the recoverable errors. The next topic — Model Essays — shows what an essay built on these principles actually looks like on the page.