Language Education Centre (LEC), Pakistan

Precis Writing

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Don’t be Afraid of Being a Beginner
What is a Precis?
o The precis is a type of summary-writing. A summary is a condensed version of
an original text. All types of summary-writing (abstract, precis, abridgement,
etc.) are based on the discrimination between essential and non-essential
information, and the compilation of the essential information into a new text.
o The precis is an uncommented and succinct written text, of a prescribed
length, that accurately reflects the content of a longer original text.
o As an academic exercise, the precis is used to develop the student’s reading,
writing, paraphrasing and summarising skills.
o As a testing tool, the precis enables examiners to evaluate not only the
linguistic skills but also the general intellectual abilities of the candidates.
How?
 The Precis-Writing Process
1. Understanding the text
a. Purpose: inform, describe, explain, persuade, narrate, or entertain?
b. Style: literary, journalistic, or scientific style. It could also be classified as abstract or concrete,
formal or informal, original or imitative. Qualities such as diction, sentence structure and variety,
imagery, rhythm, coherence and emphasis are elements of style
c. Tone: friendly, sarcastic, sincere, or artificial
2. Analysing the content
a. Analyse the structural development of the source text (study the way the ideas are presented, and
determine the underlying structure of the text): descriptive, narrative, explanatory, etc.
b. A paragraph-by-paragraph approach is usually helpful.
3. Compressing the content
a. Based on the content analysis, discriminate between essential and non-essential material. This
discrimination is an exercise in judgement, logic, and common sense.
b. In some cases, primary ideas are explicitly worded and can easily be extracted. Much more often,
however, the meaning lies on a deep rather than a surface level, and it must be extracted by
compression of thought.
 The Precis-Writing Process
4. Preparing a draft precis
a. Draw up a draft precis by following the same pattern of ideas as the original.
b. Be faithful to the meaning of the original.
c. The precis should be an original composition, not a collage of sections of the source text.
d. Keep in mind the principle of brevity. Avoid wordy expressions, needless repetition, and
circumlocutions. The rigorous demands of the word count leave no room for verbosity: each word
counts (and is counted!) and thus must make a contribution to the message.
5. Revising the precis
a. Check for omissions and inaccuracies by reading over the original, sentence by sentence, and ensuring
that all important information has been presented in the precis without distortion.
b. Ask yourself whether the precis reflects not only the content but also the purpose and tone of the
original.
c. Check your composition, ensuring that your text is clear and contains no errors of grammar, usage,
spelling, or punctuation.
Brevity: Methods of Shortening
Lengthy lists and enumerations can often be summarized by the use of generic terms. It is far better to find one general
term to summarize a series than to select one item in the series to represent the whole.

On weekends she makes pottery using her own kiln, On weekends she does crafts. √
does quilting, crochets afghans for her friends, and On weekends she makes pottery. ×
batiks.
Representatives of the Bright Party, the Great Party, Representatives of the major political parties were
and the New Party were in attendance. present. √
Representatives of the Great Party were present. ×
Methods of Shortening
Detailed descriptions, illustrations, and examples can often be omitted.
In the sentence,

“Almost any solid object offers an easier path for electricity

the main idea is expressed in the first part of the sentence, and the list of examples of "solid objects"
can be dropped.
Methods of Shortening
Metaphors, similes, and picturesque discourse can often be reduced to a neutral form, unless the image is essential to
the passage.
When you see him out at a social event, you have to wonder if he were born in a barn.
↘
He is socially inept.

She clucked about like an old hen who couldn't find her chicks.
↘
She fussed about, or She was flustered.
Methods of Shortening
● Repetition should be avoided; if repetition is used in the original text for emphasis, you could convey the
emphasis by other means, such as by using emphatic vocabulary.

● Redundancies, such as "to vacillate back and forth" or "to look back in retrospect," should be avoided.

● Circumlocutions have no place in the precis, or in any good writing for that matter. "Approximately" is
preferable to "in the neighbourhood of"; "because," to "in view of the fact that"; "if," to "in the event that"; and
"therefore," to "with the result that."
Methods of Shortening
Certain sentence structures are wordier than others. For example, subordinate clauses can often be reduced to shorter
structures with no loss of meaning:

Peter, who was in a hurry to leave, was brusque. Peter, anxious to leave, was brusque. √

Japanese leaders did not expect that their cities would Japanese leaders did not expect their cities to be
be bombed and that their navy would be destroyed. bombed and their navy destroyed. √

Similarly, parallel structures can often be shortened by the omission of common elements or by ellipsis:
Precis-Writing: An Example
Original Text
The Ivory Coast is a country awash with goods. The money comes from the land. There is no oil in the Ivory Coast
(though promising offshore deposits have recently been discovered) and no major mining. But practically
everything that can grow, does. The country is the world's third leading coffee exporter and has become first in
cocoa (in part thanks to beans smuggled in from Ghana, its troubled eastern neighbour). The forests of the
southwest and the modern port of San Pedro make it a principal supplier of timber to Europe. Most striking on a
continent of single crop economies, the Ivory Coast has successfully diversified its agriculture since it achieved
independence in 1960. The drier northern part of the country now produces some sugar, and the region's red dirt
roads are lined with dusty balls of cotton spilled from trucks headed for the coast. The southern part has become
Africa's leading exporter of pineapples and bananas. (156 words)
Sample Precis
The Ivory Coast is prosperous, thanks to its fertile land. It has little mining or oil, but it has a diversified agricultural
sector, unlike other African countries which rely on single crops. The Ivory Coast is a leading exporter of coffee,
cocoa, timber, pineapples and bananas; even the drier north grows cotton and sugar. (54 words)
Exercise
o Summarize the following paragraph in approximately 20 words.

Too frequently, lightning strikes spell disaster. Each year several hundred North Americans are killed by
lightning, and others die in the fires that follow in the wake of electrical storms. Ten thousand forest fires
and more than 30,000 building blazes are caused by lightning. Damages to property and loss of timber are
estimated at more than 50 million dollars annually.

(60 words)
Every year in North America, lightening causes several hundred deaths, ten thousand forest fires, over
30,000 building blazes, and over 50-million-dollar loss.
Application Exercise