Third, format violations

In the Chinese civil-service Shēnlùn (申论) examination, "format violations" refer to deductions imposed when a candidate's written answer fails to conform to the prescribed structural template demanded by the prompt — most acutely in the gōngwén xiězuò (公文写作, official-document writing) and yìngyòngwén (应用文, applied-writing) question types. The Shēnlùn paper, administered nationally by the State Administration of Civil Service for the Guókǎo (国考) and by provincial bureaus for the provincial shěngkǎo (省考), is graded against a published píngfēn biāozhǔn (评分标准, scoring rubric). Within that rubric, a discrete géshì fēn (格式分, format mark) — typically worth several points of the question's total — is awarded only when the document carries its required structural elements. The phrase "Third, format violations" denotes the third recurring category of error that examiners penalise, after content-deficiency and language errors, in instructional treatments of applied-writing scoring.

A compliant official document under the Chinese administrative-writing convention, codified in the Dǎngzhèng jīguān gōngwén chǔlǐ gōngzuò tiáolì (党政机关公文处理工作条例, 2012 Party-and-State Organs Document Processing Regulation), requires five canonical parts: the biāotí (标题, title), the chēnghu (称呼, addressee/salutation), the zhèngwén (正文, body), the luòkuǎn (落款, signatory), and the rìqī (日期, date). A format violation occurs when any required element is omitted, misplaced, or wrongly styled — for instance, writing a "proposal" (倡议书) without a salutation, a "speech draft" (讲话稿) without a closing signatory line, or fabricating a real organisation's name where the rubric demands a generic placeholder. Crucially, the prompt itself dictates which elements are scored; some prompts explicitly waive the title or signatory ("不必写标题"), and supplying them anyway, or omitting a demanded one, both forfeit the format mark.

The most common dated-style errors in practice include: ignoring the genre signalled by the prompt's verb (writing a report 报告 when a briefing 简报 is required); breaching the fāwénzhě–shōuwénzhě (sender–recipient) hierarchy that governs upward (请示), downward (通知), and parallel (函) documents; and exceeding or undershooting the word limit, which in some rubrics is folded into format scoring. Candidates also lose marks for revealing personal identifying information, prohibited under the examination's anonymity rule, by signing a real name instead of the stipulated "某" or "XX". Because the format mark is binary or near-binary per element, these are the cheapest points to secure and the cheapest to lose; high scorers treat the structural skeleton as a checklist completed before drafting the body.

For the exam itself, format violations are tested squarely in the Shēnlùn applied-writing question, which has grown to dominate the paper since the 2010s, often carrying the single largest point allocation. The typical question angle asks candidates to "draft a [specific document type] on behalf of [a body]," and a substantial fraction of marks turns on correct format alone, independent of argument quality. Preparation guides therefore drill the five-part template and the genre-to-format mapping. Mastery here distinguishes a passing script from a competitive one, since content can be salvaged by paraphrase but a missing salutation is an unrecoverable, mechanical deduction.