176 Breaking Down the Rhetorical Précis
Writing summaries is one of the best skills you can have as a student– and this is true in almost all of your college classes! In most classes, your main “job” is to read texts or listen to lectures and retain the important knowledge within. The problem is, most of us do not have a perfect photographic or audiographic memory with the ability to recite an entire book chapter from memory after one reading. So, our brains need us to create files and file drawers full of information– at least enough information that we can apply what we learned to other situations and topics or pull up enough of a memory to help us dig deeper into the topic. To do this, we must train our brains to quickly summarize information. Now, you may read an important article on immunology for a science class and then need to refer back to the key points for a test or in a real lab situation. But, the article was 25 pages long… How can you get the key points from a 25-page article into a short enough summary that your brain can actually hold onto the information?
A rhetorical précis (pronounced pray-see) differs from a summary in that it is a less neutral, more analytical condensation of both the content and method of the original text. If you think of a summary as primarily a brief representation of what a text says, then you might think of the rhetorical précis as a brief representation of what a text both says and does. Although less common than a summary, a rhetorical précis is a particularly useful way to sum up your understanding of how a text works rhetorically.
The rhetorical precis assignment helps you to summarize a ten to twenty-five page article into five succinct, concise sentences which will allow you to remember the important points of the article. Writing a precis, a shorter version of an article annotation, for everything you read in all of your college classes will also help you keep track of valuable information, organize articles and other sources for your research papers, and help you build your own set of resources for your classes and future career. Writing précis can be an excellent study skill, particularly for essay exams that allow you to bring your own notes, or just to help you weed out the less important information and hone in on the things you really need to learn.
THE STRUCTURE OF A RHETORICAL PRÉCIS:
Sentence One: Name of author, genre, and title of work, date in parentheses; a rhetorically active verb; and a THAT clause containing the major assertion or thesis in the text.
Sentence Two: An explanation of how the author develops and supports the thesis.
Sentence Three: A statement of the author’s apparent purpose, followed by an “in order to” phrase.
Sentence Four: A description of the intended audience and/or the relationship the author establishes with the audience.
Sentence Five: An analysis of the significance or importance of this work.
If it helps, make a template of the above structure using what we learned in the They Say I Say template activity earlier this semester.
Time to Practice:
Read this essay: “Writing as Reckoning”
Read the essay once and try to find the thesis statement, author’s purpose, audience, and why the author feels this work is important or significant to the field of study. Practice writing out a precis.
