Précis Writing — Technique and Common Mistakes

Précis Writing — Technique and Common Mistakes

Of all the components on a descriptive English paper, précis writing rewards discipline more than talent, and punishes carelessness more severely than any other section. An essay with a weak paragraph can still pass on the strength of its other paragraphs. A précis with one careless paragraph usually fails outright, because a précis is judged less on isolated sentences than on whether the whole thing, as a unit, does the one job it exists to do: compress a longer passage into a shorter one without losing the passage's actual argument. This chapter explains what that job really involves, why so many otherwise capable candidates get it wrong, and how examiners actually score the answers that land on their desks.

What a Précis Actually Is

The word précis comes from the French for "precise," and that origin is a better guide to the task than most textbook definitions. A précis is not a summary in the loose sense that people use when they say "summarise this article for me in a couple of lines" — that kind of summary is allowed to be vague, impressionistic, and selective about what it keeps. A précis is a disciplined, structured reduction of a passage to roughly one-third of its original length, written in continuous prose, in your own words as far as possible, that preserves the passage's central argument, its logical structure, and its tone, while stripping away everything that is illustrative, repetitive, or merely decorative.

Four words in that definition deserve to be underlined because they are exactly what examiners check for, one by one, when they mark your answer.

• Structured: a précis is not a set of extracted sentences stitched together. It has its own beginning, middle, and end, built as a coherent paragraph (or occasionally two, for very long passages) that reads as though it were composed as a single piece of writing, not assembled from fragments of someone else's.
• One-third: this is a convention, not a law of physics, and examining bodies vary in how strictly they enforce it — some allow a range of plus or minus ten per cent, others are stricter — but as a working rule, if your source passage is 300 words, your précis should land somewhere between 95 and 105 words, and you should always check the specific word-limit instruction given in the question, because it overrides any general convention.
• Own words: examiners are specifically trained to notice long strings of language lifted verbatim from the source. A précis that merely deletes sentences from the original, rather than rephrasing the surviving content, is marked down even if it happens to land within the word limit, because the exercise is testing your ability to comprehend and re-express, not your ability to cut.
• Central argument and logical structure: a précis must preserve what the passage is actually arguing and the order in which it builds that argument, not merely a list of topics the passage happens to mention. This is the single hardest part of the skill and the one this chapter spends the most time on.

The Standard "One-Third" Convention — Why It Exists and How to Apply It

Candidates often ask why the convention settles on one-third rather than some other fraction, and the answer, once you see it, makes the exercise feel less arbitrary. A ratio much looser than one-third — say, one-half — does not force you to make any real editorial decisions; you can keep almost every sentence in some abbreviated form and never have to ask which ideas are essential and which are merely supportive. A ratio much tighter than one-third — say, one-tenth — forces such extreme compression that even skilled writers are reduced to a bare skeleton of nouns, and the exercise stops testing prose quality altogether. One-third sits at the point where you are forced to choose, decisively, between the essential and the inessential, while still having enough room to write in complete, connected sentences rather than a telegram. That is precisely the skill the exercise wants to test — editorial judgment expressed in competent prose — and that is why the convention has survived across generations of English examinations.

In practice, apply the one-third rule as follows. Count, or closely estimate, the word count of the source passage — most exam passages will state this for you, but if not, count in blocks of ten lines and extrapolate. Divide by three to get your target. Then build in a small margin: aim to land within five to ten words of that target rather than exactly on it, because examiners are looking for a précis in the right range, not a précis that hits an exact number to the word. Writing a précis that is fifteen or twenty words over the limit is a common and entirely avoidable way to lose marks — it signals that you either could not identify what to cut or ran out of discipline halfway through, and either explanation reflects badly on the answer.

Separating the Core Argument from Supporting Detail

This is the skill that actually determines whether a précis succeeds, and it is worth spending real time on, because it is exactly the skill weaker candidates skip. Every well-constructed passage — and exam passages are usually well constructed, drawn from serious editorial or expository writing — has a hierarchy of content. At the top of that hierarchy sits the core claim: the one sentence, or occasionally the one implicit idea, that the entire passage exists to establish. Below that sit the supporting arguments: the two or three reasons, causes, or pieces of evidence the author offers to make the core claim credible. Below that sit the illustrative material: examples, anecdotes, statistics, and quotations that make the supporting arguments vivid and concrete but that are not, strictly speaking, necessary to the logical structure of the argument — they could be swapped for different examples making the same point without changing what the passage is actually claiming.

A successful précis keeps the top two levels of this hierarchy and discards almost all of the third. This is the single most important instruction in this entire chapter, so it is worth restating directly: your précis should preserve the core claim and its main supporting reasons, in your own words, and should not attempt to preserve the specific examples, statistics, or anecdotes used to illustrate those reasons, except where a number or name is itself part of the argument's substance rather than mere illustration.

Practically, this means training yourself to ask, of every sentence in the source passage, one blunt question: if this sentence were deleted, would the passage's argument still be intelligible and still be supported? If a sentence is a specific example — "for instance, in 1943 the Bengal famine killed an estimated three million people as a direct consequence of wartime export policy" — the answer is usually yes: the argument (that colonial policy converted a food shortage into mass death) survives perfectly well without that particular illustration, though the illustration made the claim vivid. If a sentence states or restates the core claim itself, the answer is no: delete it and the passage has no spine left. Practising this question, sentence by sentence, on real passages is the fastest way to develop précis judgment, faster by far than reading about the technique in the abstract.

One refinement worth adding: supporting arguments are not all equal either. A passage will often offer three reasons for its central claim, and one of those three is frequently doing more logical work than the other two — perhaps the first is the cause and the other two are merely consequences of it, or perhaps two of the three overlap so closely that keeping both in a compressed précis is wasteful repetition. Part of the skill is compressing not just sentence by sentence but reason by reason, sometimes folding two overlapping supporting points into one sentence of your précis rather than giving each its own clause.

A Worked Method, Step by Step

The following sequence works reliably under exam conditions and is worth practising until it becomes close to automatic.

1. Read the passage once, completely, without taking notes. The purpose of this first read is comprehension, not extraction. Candidates who begin underlining on the first pass often end up underlining local detail that looks important in isolation but is not important to the passage as a whole, because they have not yet grasped the whole.
2. State the core claim to yourself in one sentence, from memory, without looking back at the passage. If you cannot do this after one careful reading, read the passage again before proceeding — do not attempt to write a précis of an argument you have not yet actually understood, since précis-writing on shaky comprehension almost always produces a list of topics rather than an argument.
3. Read the passage a second time, now underlining only the sentences that state the core claim or a main supporting reason. Resist underlining examples, quotations, and statistics unless a specific figure is itself the point being argued (for instance, a passage arguing that a particular policy failure was of unprecedented scale might need to retain the scale of the figure, even while dropping the anecdote around it).
4. Draft a title. Most exam formats require a short title, generally three to six words, capturing the passage's subject. This is a small but easy mark to lose through carelessness — a vague title ("Technology," "An Essay on Society") scores worse than a specific one that reflects the passage's actual angle ("The Cost of Constant Connectivity").
5. Write the précis in a single continuous draft, in your own words, without pausing to count words yet. Follow the logical order of the original passage unless reordering genuinely improves clarity — reordering is occasionally justified but should never be done for its own sake, since departing from the source's structure without good reason increases the risk of misrepresenting the argument.
6. Count your words and trim to the target range. This step is where most of the real editing happens. Look first for adjectives and adverbs that can be cut without loss ("extremely significant" reduces cleanly to "significant"); look second for any subordinate clause that restates something already said elsewhere in your draft; look third for any remaining illustrative detail that survived your first draft and can now be removed entirely.
7. Read the final draft once more, checking specifically for two things: does it make sense to someone who has never seen the original passage, and does it accurately represent the original's argument and tone. A précis that reads fluently but subtly misrepresents the source — for instance, by presenting a balanced argument as one-sided, or by dropping a crucial "however" that reversed the passage's direction of argument — has failed at its actual job even if it is well written and within the word limit.

Common Mistakes, and Why Examiners Penalise Each One

Mistake 1: Copying Phrases Verbatim from the Source

This is the most common failing among candidates who are otherwise competent writers, and it usually happens for an understandable reason: the source passage's phrasing is often more polished than anything the candidate could produce under time pressure, so lifting it feels like the safer choice. It is not the safer choice on a précis paper. Examiners are specifically instructed to check for verbatim lifting, because the exercise exists to test comprehension-and-rephrasing, not extraction. A précis built largely from lifted phrases, even if every individual fact is correct and the word count is right, typically loses a meaningful share of the marks allotted to "language" or "expression," and in stricter marking schemes can also lose marks under "technique," since heavy lifting suggests the candidate did not actually process the material into their own understanding before writing it down.

The fix is mechanical and reliable: after your underlining pass, close the source passage or turn it face down, and write your précis draft from memory, using only your underlined notes as a prompt for content, not for wording. This single habit does more to eliminate verbatim copying than any amount of conscious effort to "paraphrase," because paraphrasing while the original sentence is sitting in front of you is cognitively very difficult — your mind keeps sliding back into the original's exact words. Writing from memory forces genuine rephrasing because the exact wording is simply not available to copy.

Mistake 2: Missing the Main Point

This is the most damaging mistake of all, because a précis that misses the passage's actual argument cannot earn full marks regardless of how polished its prose is — most marking schemes allocate the single largest share of marks to "content" or "substance," specifically the accurate capture of the central idea, precisely because this is considered the core of the skill being tested. Missing the main point typically happens in one of two ways. The first is topic-substitution: the candidate correctly identifies what the passage is about but not what it is arguing about that topic — for example, summarising a passage that argues against a specific policy as though it were merely describing the policy, with no trace of the author's actual position. The second is burying the lede: the candidate's précis technically contains the main point somewhere in its middle or end, but opens instead with a supporting detail or an example, so that a reader encountering only the précis (as an examiner effectively does) comes away with a distorted sense of what mattered most in the original.

The fix connects directly back to step 2 of the method above: forcing yourself to state the core claim in one sentence, from memory, before you begin drafting, and then making sure that sentence — or a close paraphrase of it — appears near the start of your précis, exactly as it would in a well-constructed piece of original writing. A précis, remember, is not obliged to follow the original's paragraph order sentence for sentence; it is obliged to represent the original's argument accurately, and accuracy sometimes means stating the conclusion early even if the source passage built up to it gradually.

Mistake 3: Exceeding (or Falling Well Short of) the Word Limit

Word-limit discipline is treated more strictly on précis papers than almost anywhere else in the descriptive syllabus, and candidates sometimes underestimate how much this costs them. Going significantly over the limit — say, more than fifteen per cent over the target — usually attracts a direct penalty under most marking schemes, on top of whatever content and language marks the answer separately earns, because the ability to compress to a target length is itself part of what is being tested; a longer, looser précis has simply dodged the hardest part of the exercise. Falling significantly under the limit is treated almost as harshly, though for a different reason: it usually signals that the candidate has stripped out not just illustrative detail but actual supporting argument, leaving a précis that is accurate as far as it goes but thin — missing reasons the original passage clearly considered important enough to include.

The fix is procedural rather than stylistic: always count your words, every time, even under time pressure, rather than trusting your instinct for how long 100 words "feels" on the page — instinct is unreliable, particularly in the final rushed minutes of an exam, and a précis that is thirty words over the limit because the candidate never actually counted is an entirely preventable loss of marks.

Mistake 4: Changing the Tone or the Author's Stance

A subtler mistake, but a real one at the level this book is aimed at: many source passages are not neutral reports of fact but arguments, written from a particular stance — critical, sympathetic, ironic, cautiously optimistic. A précis that accurately preserves the passage's factual content but flattens or reverses its tone has still failed to represent the passage faithfully. This happens most often with passages that use irony or understatement, which candidates under time pressure sometimes read too literally, producing a précis that states the opposite of what the author actually meant. It also happens with passages that reach a qualified, two-sided conclusion — "while X has clear costs, on balance the evidence favours Y" — which candidates compress into an unqualified, one-sided statement because qualification feels like the kind of "extra" language a tight word limit should sacrifice. It should not be sacrificed; a qualification that changes the actual claim being made is content, not decoration, and belongs in the précis even at the cost of an illustrative example elsewhere.

Mistake 5: Writing in Fragmented Notes Rather Than Continuous Prose

Especially among candidates who have practised note-making for other exams, there is a tendency to render a précis as a series of clipped, telegraphic clauses — dropping articles, connectives, and verbs to save words. This misunderstands the exercise: a précis must read as fluent, grammatically complete prose, connected by appropriate linking words (however, consequently, moreover, in contrast) that make the logical relationships between ideas explicit, exactly as they would be in any well-written paragraph. Word-count pressure should be resolved by cutting content, not by cutting grammar. A précis that reads like a shopping list, however accurate its content, will lose marks under "expression" or "language" that a fluently written précis of the same length would keep.

How Examiners Typically Score a Précis

Marking schemes vary between exam boards, but most converge on a broadly similar allocation, usually across three or four heads, and understanding this allocation should directly shape how you spend your limited time in the exam hall.

• Content and substance (typically the largest share, often 40–50 percent of the marks): does the précis capture the core claim and the main supporting arguments accurately, without significant omission or distortion? This is why steps 2 and 3 of the method above — nailing the core claim before you start writing — deserve more of your preparation time than any other single skill in this chapter.
• Language and expression (typically 25–35 percent): is the précis written in fluent, grammatically correct, connected prose, in the candidate's own words rather than lifted phrasing, with an appropriate and consistent tone?
• Technique — title, word limit, and format (typically 15–20 percent): is there an appropriate title; is the word count within the permitted range; is the précis written as continuous prose in the required format (a single paragraph, unless the passage is unusually long)?
• Overall coherence (sometimes assessed separately, sometimes folded into language marks): does the précis read as a single, well-organised piece of writing rather than a set of disconnected extracted points?

The practical implication of this weighting is worth stating plainly, because candidates under time pressure often get the priority backwards: a précis that is beautifully written but misses or distorts the core argument will score worse than a précis that is written in plain, competent, unremarkable prose but captures the argument accurately and stays within the word limit. Spend your first and most careful effort on comprehension — understanding exactly what the passage is arguing, in what order, and with what qualifications — before you spend any effort on making the sentences elegant. Elegant sentences that summarise the wrong thing earn very little; plain sentences that summarise the right thing earn most of the marks available.

Précis Writing for Letters, Reports, and Minutes — Format Variations

Most examination syllabi test précis on expository or argumentative prose, but some — particularly departmental and promotional examinations in government service — occasionally ask candidates to précis an office memorandum, a committee report, or the minutes of a meeting. These formats bring their own conventions, and a candidate who has only practised on newspaper editorials can be caught off guard by them. An office memorandum typically states its purpose in the opening lines and buries its operative instruction somewhere in the middle or at the end; a précis of such a document must foreground the operative instruction — what is actually being asked, approved, or directed — even if the original buried it under procedural preamble, because the operative content is what a reader of the précis actually needs. Minutes of a meeting record discussion, disagreement, and eventual resolution; a précis of minutes should not attempt to preserve who said what in sequence, which is committee-room detail, but should preserve what was decided and, where relevant, on what grounds, since the decision and its rationale are the substance a précis of minutes exists to carry forward. In each of these formats, the underlying discipline from this chapter still applies without modification — separate the core content from procedural and illustrative detail, write in continuous prose, respect the word limit — but recognising the format helps you locate the core content faster, since bureaucratic prose habitually places its most important sentence in a different position than an editorial does.

Handling Passages That Contain Two Competing Viewpoints

A specific and recurring difficulty deserves its own treatment: passages that do not argue a single position but instead lay out two competing views before reaching, or declining to reach, a conclusion. Candidates often mishandle these passages in one of two ways. Some collapse the two views into one, effectively précising only the side they personally found more persuasive or more memorable, which misrepresents a passage that was deliberately balanced. Others preserve both views but fail to preserve the passage's own weighting between them — treating a passage that clearly favours one view, while acknowledging the other, as though it treated both with perfect neutrality, or the reverse, imposing a decisive conclusion onto a passage that the author deliberately left open.

The corrective is to identify, during your first careful reading, not only what the two views are but how the author actually positions themselves relative to those views — fully neutral, leaning toward one side while acknowledging the other, or reaching an explicit conclusion after weighing both. Your précis needs to reproduce this positioning accurately, using appropriate connecting language: "while some argue X, others contend Y, and the balance of evidence favours Y" reads very differently, and correctly represents a very different passage, from "there are two views, X and Y, with no clear resolution." Getting this distinction right is precisely what separates a précis that merely lists content from one that actually represents the passage's argument, and it is one of the more reliable ways for a strong candidate to distinguish their answer from an average one in this specific area.

Building Précis Skill Through Deliberate Practice

Précis is one of the few skills on a descriptive paper that improves measurably and relatively quickly with structured practice, because unlike essay writing, where quality depends on the breadth of what a candidate happens to know about a topic, précis quality depends almost entirely on a repeatable process that can be drilled. A practical routine for the weeks before an examination: select one unfamiliar passage of 250 to 400 words daily, from a genuinely varied set of sources — editorial columns, scientific popularisation, historical writing, government reports where available — and complete the full seven-step method from this chapter under a strict time limit, ideally the same time limit you will face in the actual examination hall, which is typically between fifteen and twenty minutes depending on the specific exam. Resist the temptation to select only passages on topics you find interesting; examination passages are chosen by committee and can land on anything, and a candidate who has only practised on topics of personal interest is disproportionately likely to be unsettled by an unfamiliar or technical passage on the actual exam day.

After completing each daily précis, compare it against the checklist below, but also — and this step is frequently skipped, to the detriment of the candidate skipping it — read your own précis after a gap of a day or two, with fresh eyes, as though it were someone else's work. Errors that are invisible to you immediately after writing, because your memory of the source passage is still filling in gaps your précis actually left, become obvious once that memory has faded and the précis has to stand entirely on its own. This single habit, more than any other piece of advice in this chapter, is what separates candidates who plateau at a mediocre level of précis-writing from those who steadily improve toward genuine fluency in the skill.

A Fully Worked Illustration of the Method

To make every step in this chapter concrete before you move to the fully worked passages in the chapters that follow, consider briefly how the method applies to a short illustrative passage. Suppose the source states: "Urban traffic congestion in Indian metropolitan cities has worsened steadily over the past decade, not principally because the number of vehicles has grown — though it certainly has — but because road infrastructure has expanded far more slowly than vehicle ownership, and because public transport systems, chronically underfunded, have failed to offer a genuinely attractive alternative to private vehicle ownership for the growing middle class. The consequence is a city where a growing number of people who could, in principle, use public transport choose not to, adding to congestion that in turn makes public transport itself slower and less reliable, further discouraging its use — a self-reinforcing cycle that infrastructure spending alone, without parallel investment in public transport quality, is unlikely to break."

Applying step 2 of the method, the core claim, stated in one sentence from memory, might be: "Indian urban congestion has worsened mainly because infrastructure and public transport have not kept pace with rising vehicle ownership, producing a self-reinforcing cycle." Applying step 3, the supporting reasons to underline are the infrastructure gap and the public transport gap, and the self-reinforcing mechanism connecting them; the specific claim about "the growing middle class" is worth a brief mention as it explains who is driving the shift, but is not itself a separate argument requiring its own sentence. A compressed précis of just this passage might read: "Worsening urban traffic congestion in Indian cities stems less from rising vehicle numbers alone than from infrastructure growth lagging behind vehicle ownership and public transport remaining an unattractive alternative for the middle class. This produces a self-reinforcing cycle, as congestion further degrades public transport reliability, discouraging its use — a cycle unlikely to break through infrastructure spending alone, without matching investment in public transport quality." This is roughly one-third the length of the source, preserves the core claim and the self-reinforcing mechanism the passage is actually building toward, and drops nothing but the parenthetical qualification about vehicle numbers having "certainly" grown, which restates a point already implicit in the phrase "less from rising vehicle numbers alone." Notice, too, that this compressed version is written independently rather than by simply deleting clauses from the source — precisely the discipline this chapter has been arguing for throughout.

A Short Diagnostic Checklist

Before submitting any précis, whether in practice or in the actual examination, run through this checklist in under a minute:

• Does the first sentence of my précis convey the passage's central claim, not merely its topic?
• Have I kept the main supporting reasons and dropped the specific examples, statistics, and anecdotes used to illustrate them (unless a figure is itself part of the argument)?
• Is my word count within the required range, and have I actually counted rather than estimated?
• Have I avoided lifting phrases directly from the source passage?
• Does my précis read as fluent, connected prose rather than a list of disjointed points?
• Have I preserved the author's tone and any important qualification in the original argument (rather than flattening a two-sided conclusion into a one-sided one)?
• Have I given the précis a short, specific title?

Master these seven checks, and apply them under time pressure until they become automatic, and you will consistently outperform candidates who write more fluently but skip the underlying discipline. The three chapters that follow this one give you full worked passages and model précis, annotated to show exactly which sentences survive compression and why, so that the method described here becomes concrete rather than theoretical.