Report on the Abuses of Mobile Phones

Frame it around a finding — a survey, a school's decision, a rise in complaints — then set out the specific abuses: lost study time, disturbed sleep, harassment, cheating in examinations. Balance is expected in a report, so acknowledge the phone's usefulness before describing its misuse.

The question: Write a report on the abuses of mobile phones among students.

The format

Build the report on a survey

A survey gives you numbers to report, people to quote and a day on which something happened. State who conducted it, among how many, and the headline finding in the first sentence.

• Keep the sample size plausible.
• Give the finding as a proportion or an hours figure.
• 🚨 Without a survey or a policy change there is no news.

Report the mechanism, not the moralising

The second paragraph gives detail: when usage peaks, what it displaces, what teachers observe in class. Facts about behaviour, not judgements about it.

• One timing detail — after nine at night — is worth a paragraph of generalisation.
• Attribute classroom observations to teachers.

Give the other side a voice

Quote someone acknowledging the phone's usefulness, then report what is being asked for. Balance is part of the register mark in a report.

• One quotation from a head teacher.
• ⚠️ Report the psychologists' recommendation as theirs.

Model answer

Model answer (about 200 words)

School survey finds phone use hitting study hours

Staff Correspondent

Rajshahi, 5 September: A survey conducted among students of six secondary schools in the city has found that a majority spend more than three hours a day on mobile phones, most of it on social media and games, teachers said on Thursday.

The survey, carried out by the schools' guardians' forum among about nine hundred students of classes eight to ten, found that phone use rose sharply after nine in the evening and that many students reported sleeping after midnight on school nights. Teachers said the effect was visible in class, with concentration noticeably lower in the first two periods.

"We are not against the phone," said the head teacher of one participating school. "The difficulty is that it arrives in a child's hand with no rules attached to it at all."

Guardians' representatives have asked schools to hold sessions on managing screen time, and several schools have already restricted phones on campus. Psychologists consulted by the forum recommended fixed hours rather than outright bans, saying that prohibition without agreement tends simply to move the use out of sight.

What earns and loses marks

• Acknowledge the benefit before reporting the misuse. A report that treats the phone as purely harmful reads as an opinion piece, and balance is part of the register mark.
• Put the numbers in the first sentence. A news report leads with how many, where and when; anything else in the opening line is an essay opening in disguise.
• 🚨 Keep yourself out of it. “We should all be careful on the roads” is a sentence from a composition and loses the register mark immediately.
• Attribute every claim you could not have witnessed. Unattributed figures are the clearest sign of an invented report.
• About 180 to 220 words in four short paragraphs is the right length; newspaper paragraphs are short by convention.