Precis Writing: the Method

In one line

A precis is the substance of a passage rewritten in about a third of its length, in your own words, in your own order of nothing, keeping every essential idea and no example, and given a title.

In the wording a student can write in an examination: a precis is a brief, clear and complete summary of a passage, reduced to roughly one third of the original, expressed in the writer's own words and in the third person and past tense, containing all the essential ideas of the original and nothing that is not in it.

The five requirements

Every rule of precis writing comes from one of these five.

1. Brevity. About one third of the original. Not a quarter, not a half.

2. Clarity. A reader who has never seen the original must understand the precis by itself.

3. Completeness. Every essential idea survives. Nothing essential may be dropped for the sake of brevity.

4. Faithfulness. Nothing may be added. No comment, no criticism, no illustration of your own, however apt.

5. Unity. A precis is one continuous paragraph in connected prose, not a list of points.

The rules, stated exactly

Length: about one third. Count the original if the paper does not give the count. A tolerance of ten per cent either way is normally accepted, so for a 150-word passage anything from about 45 to 55 words is safe. Write the word count at the end. Examiners look for it.

Your own words. Key technical terms may be kept where no substitute exists, but the sentences must be recast. A precis made by joining the original's sentences with the middles deleted is not a precis.

Third person. "I have often thought" becomes "The writer had often thought". Convert first and second person throughout.

Past tense, ordinarily, since the passage is being reported. Universal truths and permanent facts stay in the present: water boils at 100 degrees, not water boiled.

Indirect speech. Direct speech in the passage becomes reported speech in the precis.

One paragraph. However long the original, the precis is a single paragraph, unless the passage is very long and clearly falls into parts.

No quotation, no rhetorical questions, no exclamations. A rhetorical question becomes the statement it implies. "Can any nation prosper while half its people are illiterate?" becomes "No nation could prosper while half its people were illiterate."

A title. Short, three to six words, capturing the central idea. Marks are given for it separately, so never omit it.

No examples, illustrations, repetitions, similes or digressions. These are the material you cut first.

What to cut, and in what order

Cut in this order and the length comes down without loss.