- Format: title at the top, then your name and grade below it. Nothing else — an article is not a letter, so there is no address, date or salutation.
- Four paragraphs in the given order, each doing only its own job. Paragraph 1 must stay general; the details belong in Paragraph 2.
- Evidence in Paragraph 2 — the book asks for “examples, facts, and quotations”. Use at least one real example and one quotation, and attribute it.
- Register: third person and formal-but-warm; a school magazine has a general readership. Avoid slang and avoid addressing “you, dear readers”.
- Length: about 150–200 words for Class 9.
Sample answer:
by Meera Raghunath, Grade IX-B
We are used to thinking of the elderly as people who need looking after. It is worth turning the sentence round. In most families, the oldest member is also the one who has survived the most, and a household that listens to its elders is quietly better informed than one that does not.
The evidence is not hard to find. It was my grandmother who taught our street to store monsoon water in the old cement tank, a practice everyone had abandoned; the tank now serves four houses through April and May. India’s public life offers the same lesson on a larger scale — Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was seventy-three when he was still telling students, “Dream, dream, dream. Dreams transform into thoughts and thoughts result in action.” The elderly also hold what is not written down: recipes, songs, remedies, the correct way to say a word in a dialect no textbook records. Ask an eighty-year-old about a village name and you will usually get a story, not a fact.
What impresses me most is not what they know but what they have come through. My own grandfather lost his shop in a fire in 1987, borrowed from three neighbours, and reopened within a year; he has never once described this as brave. In Asha Nehemiah’s story Vitamin-M, Grandpa is seventy-five, half deaf, half blind, and has been moved out of his own house — and he still says, with perfect dignity, “I’ve been looking after myself for the better part of my seventy-five years.” Watching such steadiness has changed how I meet a bad result or a lost match. Complaint, I have noticed, is a habit of the comfortable.
Caring for our elders is a duty, and we should perform it. But it is only half of what we owe them. The other half is to ask them things, and then to be quiet long enough to hear the answer — because the day will come when the family has a question and there is nobody old enough left to answer it.