Assalam alaikum everyone, newspaper tasks used to be the most cumbersome for me while preparing for CE2018. In order to make things easier, I came up with a method which I feel might help other aspirants on this forum.
This is how it worked:
- Use a word processing software like Word or Excel
- Create a table with three colums; 1) date; 2) category; 3) summary
- Assign a category to a news article, and write down the important bullet points from the story
So for October 10th 2018, this is what my table looked like: (the yellow cell is to highlight that this was an editorial, not a news piece)
Now how was this helpful? When revision time came, all I had to do was sort the category column and it would list all items in each category chronologically. This was helpful because it gave me a picture of how the situation developed over the past few months.
This is how how my table looked like after I sorted the category. Notice how it all seems like an easy to follow story.
I hope some of you might find this technique useful. I guess someone might have questions about how time intensive this whole exercise was, and to be honest, I rarely spent more than an hour with the newspaper. I was helped by the fact that I can type pretty fast. But don't let that demotivate you. Think of it this way, since all selected candidates have to take typing classes once they reach Civil Services Academy, you'll just be preparing for your time at CSA (insha'Allah).
Please let me know if you have any questions and I'll be happy to respond.