Five ways to form headings in a Mains answer

One of the commonest techniques for marks enrichment in Mains is to write in headings and subheadings, instead of direct points. How do you form them?

1. PESTEL: political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal headings.
2. Life cycle: for data, it can be gathering, processing, storage and dissemination. For electricity, generation, transmission and distribution.
3. Stakeholders: citizens, government, civil society, international.
4. Type or classification: for example SATI, for survey data, administrative data, transaction data and institutional data.
5. Headings and subheadings taken from the question itself.

Example: use the life cycle approach to explain why the cost of data is falling. Random points look much worse than the same points under headings.

Keep definitions ready

Keep a list of definitions for the 200 to 300 commonest terms. This is the bare minimum. You don’t have time in Mains to think up and frame your own definitions.