English for Academic and Professional Purposes

LESSON 5: PRECIS WRITING

A Précis is a brief, original summary of the important ideas given in a long selection.
Its aim is to give the general effect created by the original selection. It is a concise and
lucid summary that forsake all unnecessary details (including illustrations,
amplifications, and embellishments) in favor of reproducing the logic, development,
organization and emphasis of the original. Retaining the substance of a fuller
statement, it seeks to articulate another authors thought by extracting the maximum
amount of information and carefully conveying it in a minimum number of words.

The purpose:

Précis writing aims at intelligent reading and clear, accurate writing. It is a skill of both
analysis and generalizing that critically questions every thought included and
excluded, each word used to express those thoughts, and the proportions and
arrangements of those thoughts – bot in the original and original and in the precis. In
its exaction, it mercilessly reveals an author’s wordiness and looseness or thinness of
thought and construction. It should strengthen our style, our sense of proportion and
emphasis, and our sensitivity to word meanings and an author’s viewpoint.

Guide to a Successful Précis:

1. Understand the essential facts or dominating idea of the passage.

2. In your opening sentence express what the passage tends to show.
3. With as few sentences as possible enlarge on the essential shown in the opening
sentence.
4. Summarize only what the author says; do not add your own opinions.
5. As far as possible, use your own words.
6. Ask whether the precis is clear to one who has not seen the original.
A précis is usually reduced to at least one-fourth of its original length and frequently
much more. How long it is will be determined by its purpose and by the nature of the
original.

EXAMPLE

A drop of water fell out of the cloud into the sea, and finding itself lost in such an
immensity of fluid matter, broke out into the following reflection: ‘Alas! What an

inconsiderable creature am I in this prodigious ocean of waters: My existence is of

no concern in the universe; ‘I am reduced to a kind of nothing, and am the least of
the works of God’. It so happened that an oyster which lay in the drop say the fables,
lay a great while hardening in the shell, until by degrees it was ripened into a pearl,
falling into the hands of a diver, after a long series of adventures, is at
 present that famous pearl which is fixed on the top of the Persian diadem. Précis
Once, a drop of water, while falling into the sea, ruminated on its inconsequential
existence in the vast ocean. Just then, an oyster swallowed it. The water drop,

embedded in the shell, became a pearl in due course. A diver got it. After changing
many hands, it now decorates the Persian crown.

What’s More
Activity 5.1 Precis Writing Direction: Read the
passage and make a precis below.

1. Home is the young, who known “nothing of the world and who would be forlorn
and sad, if thrown upon it. It is providential, shelter of the weak and inexperienced,
who have to learn yet to cope with the temptations, which lies outside of it. It is the
place of training of those who are not only ignorant, but have not yet learnt how to
learn, and who have to be taught by careful individual trail, how to set about
profiting by the lessons of the teacher. In addition, it is the school of elementary
studies-not of advances, for such studies alone can make masterminds.
Moreover, it is the shrine of our best affections, the bosom or our fondest
recollections, at spell upon our after life, a stay for world-weary mind and soul;
wherever we are, until the end comes. Such are attributes or offices of home, and
like to these, in one or other sense or measure, are the attributes and offices of a
college in a university.
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2. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine
providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, and the connection
of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the
genius of their age, betraying their perception that the trustworthy was seated at their
heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now
men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not
minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but
guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on
Chaos and the Dark.

An excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”

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What I Have Learned

Precis writing is one of the most useful skills you can acquire as a
student and as a professional in the future. Precis writing involves
summarizing a document to extract the maximum amount of information,
then conveying this information to a reader in minimum words.

GETTING DEEPER!
Lesson:
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What I want to say about the lesson:
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What I found out:
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