Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
On an overnight train to Madurai, the woman in the berth opposite mine wrote for almost an hour by the light of a small torch. Her notebook was fat and cloth-covered. She wrote slowly, now and then striking out a line. For five years I have helped build a note-taking app, so I watched her more closely than was polite.
When I asked, she said she had tried keeping a diary on her phone and given up. On the phone she kept deleting things. On paper a cancelled line is still there, so her second thoughts stay in plain sight. Months later she can look back and see how her mind moved, line by line. I think she has a point that people in my line of work rarely admit. An app is built to make writing smooth. It fixes spellings and saves the neat final version. A diary is not meant to be neat. It is meant to catch you before you have tidied yourself up. Her notebook also has no audience. It sends no reminders and waits for no likes.
None of this makes paper safer. A notebook can be left on a train or soaked in a leaking bag, and anyone can read it. Mine would be locked with a password and copied to the cloud. You also cannot search a stack of old notebooks for the day you first met someone. She agreed about the searching. About the rest she only shrugged and went back to her page, the torch held in her teeth.
The writer’s remark that a diary ‘is meant to catch you before you have tidied yourself up’ implies that
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → a diary is most useful when it holds feelings in their first, unpolished form
To tidy yourself up here means to make your thoughts look neat and proper. The writer says a diary should catch you before you do this.
- Just before this, the writer says, “A diary is not meant to be neat.”
- An app saves “the neat final version”. A diary should hold what you felt first, before you smoothed it. Unpolished means not yet made neat.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: a diary entry is best rewritten neatly once the writer has calmed down — Incorrect. Contradicted: The neat final version is what an app saves. The writer says a diary is not meant to be neat.
Option 2: people who keep diaries tend to be untidy in their daily lives — Incorrect. Misread: This takes “tidied” in its everyday sense. The remark is about thoughts on a page, not about rooms or habits.
Option 3: writing by hand is quicker than typing, so feelings are caught sooner — Incorrect. Contradicted: The woman “wrote slowly”. The remark is about catching feelings before they are made neat, not about speed.