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.

ACTIVITY: Precis Writing

Directions: 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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