Precis Writing Project
Precis writing is one style of writing that students will work on throughout this school year. What is a précis?
“A well-written précis should be a … substitute for the original work. The goal is to preserve the core essence
of the work in a manner that is both clear and concise. At a minimum, the précis should include the topic or
main thesis, the purpose of the research, what was studied, what methods were used, what results (or insight)
were gained, and a conclusion. – Constance DeVereaux
Your teachers have put together a list of newspaper articles, magazine articles, and essays which will be your
choices for the school year. On the following pages, you’ll see a list of the articles grouped under common
subject headings and a link. (Please let me know if any of the links are “broken.”) For each assignment, select
an article or essay under the subject heading assigned and print it. An example article with annotation guide
and writing template are also included in this document.
Popular Culture
Sam Dillon, “Evictions at Sorority Raise Issue of Bias”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/education/25sorority.html
Ellen Goodman, “The Culture of Thin Bites Fiji”
http://www.abac.peachnet.edu/mwillis/ENGL1102/The%20Culture%20of%20Thin.pdf
Joe LaPointe, “Bonding Over a Mascot”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/29/sports/ncaafootball/29seminoles.html
Danah M. Boyd and Nicole B. Ellison, “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship”
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
Heather Havenstein, “One in Five Employers Uses Social Networks in Hiring Process”
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9114560/One_in_five_employers_uses_social_networks_in_hi
ring_process
Tamar Lewin, “Study Finds Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Isn’t Such a Bad Thing”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/us/20internet.html
Michael Hogan, “The Colonel” http://www.asfg.mx/~sinfronteras/docs/MichaelHoganTheColonel.pdf
Stephen King, “Why We Crave Horror Movies” http://drmarkwomack.com/pdfs/horrormovies.pdf
Laura Miller, “Cat People vs. Dog People” http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2002/08/29/pets
Dave Barry, “Road Warrior” http://swisselle.ch/welcome.html
1
The United States: A Melting Pot
Rochelle, Sharpe, “English Loses Ground”
http://159.54.226.237/08_issues/081116/081116americanumbers-english.html
Hyon B. Shin with Rosalind Bruno, “Language Use and English-Speaking Ability: 2000”
http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-29.pdf
Amy Martinez Starke, ”Hmong Elder Didn’t Forget the Old Ways”
http://www.oregonlive.com/obituaries/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1221792906291940.xml&coll
=7
Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me”
http://www.jjuriaan.com/How_It_Feels_to_be_Colored_Me.pdf
Science
Mark Bittman, “Why Take Food Seriously? Because Your Life Depends on It”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine
Solomon H. Katz, “The World Food Crisis: An Overview of the Causes and Consequences and Food Crisis
Information & Resources” http://www.aaanet.org/publications/upload/49-7-Solomon-Katz-In-Focus.pdf
Mark Coleman, “Review of Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why we Bought It”
http://www.aaanet.org/publications/upload/49-7-Solomon-Katz-In-Focus.pdf
Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras” (Flying Jewels)
http://nowimjustashotinthedark.blogspot.com/2008/02/joyas-voladoras-by-brian-doyle.html
Richard Feynman, “The Value of Science” http://alexpetrov.com/memes/sci/value.html
Religion
Laurie Goodstein, “More Religion, but Not the Old-Time Kind”
http://www.rickross.com/reference/fundamentalists/fund156.html
D. Michael Lindsay, “Evangelicalism Rebounds in Academe”
http://catholicintellectualtraditions.com/content/sites/default/files/Lindsay%20Michael.pdf
Albert Einstein, “An Ideal of Service to Our Fellow Man” http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16465/
Langston Hughes, “Salvation” http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ENG200-dwc/hughes.htm
2
Education
Lisa W. Foderaro, “The Well-to-Do Get Less So, and Teenagers Feel the Crunch”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/nyregion/13teens.html
Charles Murray, “Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/opinion/28murray.html
Sandy Baum and Jennifer Ma for the College Board, “Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education
for Individuals and Society” pages 1-17
http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/trends/ed_pays_2007.pdf
Francis Bacon, “Of Studies” http://grammar.about.com/od/60essays/a/studiesessay.htm
Frederick Douglass, “Learning to Read and Write”
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/07.html
Diversity
Sarah Karnasiewicz, “The Campus Crusade for Guys”
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2006/02/15/affirmative_action/
David Horowitz, “In Defense of Intellectual Diversity” http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fnews/1075039/posts
Libby Sander, “Blue-Collar Boomers Take Work Ethic to College” pages 60-64
http://www.ibhe.state.il.us/NewsDigest/NewsWeekly/011808.pdf
Gretel Ehrlich, “About Men” http://www.bhcc.mass.edu/LanguageLab/About_Men.pdf
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Facts on the Ground”
http://books.google.com/books?id=7N7YSHhPGPkC&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=Facts+on+the+Ground+A
ppiah&source=bl&ots=9H2fzXoF4g&sig=Ul30tWbUop0BJfcL4GVwnVbL41Q&hl=en&ei=MtVVTLCoLMH8
8Aan-5SqAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
3
July 27, 2010
Lost in a Maze
By MAUREEN DOWD – New York Times
WASHINGTON
The waterfall of leaks on Afghanistan underlines the awful truth: We’re not in control.
Not since Theseus fought the Minotaur in his maze has a fight been so confounding.
The more we try to do for our foreign protectorates, the more angry they get about what we try to do. As Congress passed
$59 billion in additional war funding on Tuesday, not only are our wards not grateful, they’re disdainful.
Washington gave the Wall Street banks billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the back, handing out a fortune in
bonuses to the grifters who almost wrecked our economy.
Washington gave the Pakistanis billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the back, pledging to fight the militants even as
they secretly help the militants.
We keep getting played by people who are playing both sides.
Robert Gibbs recalled that President Obama said last year that “we will not and cannot provide a blank check” to Pakistan.
But only last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Pakistan to hand over a juicy check: $500 million in aid to
the country that’s been getting a billion a year for most of this decade and in 2009 was pledged another $7.5 billion for the
next five. She vowed to banish the “legacy of suspicion” and show that “there is so much we can accomplish together as
partners joined in common cause.”
Gibbs argued that the deluge of depressing war documents from the whistle-blower Web site WikiLeaks, reported by The
New York Times and others, was old. But it reflected one chilling fact: the Taliban has been getting better and better every
year of the insurgency. So why will 30,000 more troops help?
We invaded two countries, and allied with a third — all renowned as masters at double-dealing. And, now lured into their
mazes, we still don’t have the foggiest idea, shrouded in the fog of wars, how these cultures work. Before we went into Iraq
and Afghanistan, both places were famous for warrior cultures. And, indeed, their insurgents are world class.
But whenever America tries to train security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan so that we can leave behind a somewhat stable
country, it’s positively Sisyphean. It takes eons longer than our officials predict. The forces we train turn against us or go
over to the other side or cut and run. If we give them a maximum security prison, as we recently did in Iraq, making a big
show of handing over the key, the imprisoned Al Qaeda militants are suddenly allowed to escape.
4
The British Empire prided itself on discovering warrior races in places it conquered — Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, as the
Brits called Pashtuns. But why are they warrior cultures only until we need them to be warriors on our side? Then they’re
untrainably lame, even when we spend $25 billion on building up the Afghan military and the National Police Force,
dubbed “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” by Newsweek.
Maybe we just can’t train them to fight against each other. But why can’t countries that produce fierce insurgencies
produce good standing armies in a reasonable amount of time? Is it just that insurgencies can be more indiscriminate?
Things are so bad that Robert Blackwill, who was on W.’s national security team, wrote in Politico that the Obama
administration should just admit failure and turn over the Pashtun South to the Taliban since it will inevitably control it
anyway. He said that the administration doesn’t appreciate the extent to which this is a Pashtun nationalist uprising.
We keep hearing that the last decade of war, where we pour in gazillions to build up Iraq and Afghanistan even as our own
economy sputters, has weakened Al Qaeda.
But at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. James Mattis, who is
slated to replace Gen. David Petraus, warned that Al Qaeda and its demon spawn represent a stark danger all over the
Middle East and Central Asia.
While we’re anchored in Afghanistan, the Al Qaeda network could roil Yemen “to the breaking point,” as Mattis put it in
written testimony.
Pakistan’s tribal areas “remain the greatest danger as these are strategic footholds for Al Qaeda and its senior leaders,
including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri,” the blunt four-star general wrote, adding that they “remain key to
extremists’ efforts to rally Muslim resistance worldwide.”
Questioned by John McCain, General Mattis said that we’re not leaving Afghanistan; we’re starting “a process of transition
to the Afghan forces.” But that process never seems to get past the starting point.
During the debate over war funds on Tuesday, Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, warned that we
are in a monstrous maze without the ball of string to find our way out.
“All of the puzzle has been put together, and it is not a pretty picture,” he told The Times’s Carl Hulse. “Things are really
ugly over there.”
5
6
7
Reference Guide for Writing a Rhetorical Precis
There are two purposes for a rhetorical précis: the first, to practice writing a concise summary of
an argument; and the second, to demonstrate comprehension of the complexities and nuances inherent in
sophisticated discourse. The rhetorical précis includes six parts. The following outlines the information
you should include in each of the five parts.
Part 1: Introduce the writer or speaker, the text, and the central claim.
Part 2: Explain how the author develops or advance the argument.
Part 3: State the author’s purpose of the text.
Part 4: Describe the intended audience and the author’s relationship to the audience.
Part 5: Give examples of rhetorical techniques and the effect on the author’s purpose
Part 6: Explain the significance of this work.
Part 1: Introduce the writer or speaker, the text, and the central claim.
Sample:
In a New York Times opinion article dated July 27, 2010, columnist Maureen Dowd suggests that the
United States is not in full control in the war on terror.
Template:
In ____________________ ____________________________________________________, ___________________________________________,
(type of text)
(title of text, publication date)
(author’s first and last name)
_________________ (see your Yellow Pages for verbs) that _____________________________________________________________
(verb)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
(paraphrase or directly quote the central claim and include other essential sub-claims)
Part 2: Explain how the author develops or advances the argument. When completing this section of the
précis, consider how the author has developed or supported his or her central claim. What does the writer or
speaker do in each paragraph and in each section? For instance, authors will illustrate an idea, describe an event,
share an anecdote, or draw a comparison to some other work. The explanation for this section typically follows the
sequence of ideas in the text.
8
Sample:
She develops this claim by first outlining the “confounding” nature of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Then
Ms. Dowd provides numerous anecdotes with the bottom line demonstrating that we have been “lured into their maze”
with “insurgents [who] are world class.”
Template:
___________________________________ this claim by first ________________________________________________________________________
(He/She) (supports/develops)
(Explain what the author is doing: verb)
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
Then, __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
(Explain what the author does next)
(Here you might consider starting with a prepositional phrase like “Toward the end of the text” or “In the section” or
some other phrase in order to add variety to your writing.)
Part 3: State the author’s purpose of the text.
Sample:
Maureen Dowd’s purpose is to persuade those in government as well as U.S. citizens that this war on
terror has become a “monstrous maze without a ball of string to find our way out.” She doesn’t need to directly state her
opposition to the war since she provides ample proof in the form of data and anecdotes to call for an end to the U.S.
involvement in Afghanistan.
Template:
________________ ‘s purpose is to ______________________________________________________________________________________________
(author’s last name)
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
in order to ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
(What does the author want the audience to do or feel as a result of this work?)
___________________________________________________________________________________________
9
Part 4: Describe the intended audience and the author’s relationship to the audience.
Sample:
Ms. Dowd establishes an ominous and pessimistic tone with her immediate audience of New York Times
readers. Her credibility is well-established since she has not only been a columnist for this newspaper but also for several
national magazines. Additionally, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her series on Bill Clinton during his controversial years as
President.
Template:
________ establishes __________________________ for ______________________________________________________________________________
(He/She)
(Describe the tone of the author.)
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
(What is the relationship between the author and his/her audience?)
Part 5: Give examples of rhetorical techniques and the effect on the author’s purpose.
Sample:
The columnist begins her article with a mythological allusion to Theseus’s fight with a Minotaur in a
maze. The effect of this allusion is to establish the idea of the war in Afghanistan being compared to a puzzle in
which the U.S. has no clear cut solution or ending. In addition, she presents one of the great paradoxes of our
involvement – the more “we try to do for our…protectorates, they more angry they get.” She repeats this idea in
paragraphs 4 and 5 with the anecdotes of Washington’s Wall Street bank bail-outs and Pakistanis “billions” and
how we were then “stabbed…in the back.” This shows that yes, indeed, our involvement in Afghanistan is another
examples of history repeating itself. Finally, a hyperbole towards the end of this article presents a clear picture of
the realities we face. Ms. Dowd asserts that “we [have] pour[ed] gazillions to build up Iraq and Afghanistan even as
our own economy sputters.” The effect here is a reminder that many Americans are going through tough economic
times which leads us to ask, “Why throw good money after bad?”
Template:
______________ (use a power verb) ___________________________________, for example in paragraph ___,
(Author’s name)
(a rhetorical strategy)
_____________________________________. The effect _______________________________________________________________________________
(quote or paraphrase)
(relate the rhetorical strategy to the author’s purpose)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ .
In addition, __________________________ in paragraph _____ ____________________________________________________________________
(another rhetorical strategy)
__________________________________________________________________________________________.
(relate the rhetorical strategy to the author’s purpose)
10
(quote or paraphrase)
Finally, _____________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________________
(another rhetorical strategy)
(quote or paraphrase)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
(relate the rhetorical strategy to the author’s purpose)
Part 6: Explain the significance of this work.
Sample:
This work is significant because through numerous factual anecdotes and logical reasoning,
Maureen Dowd’s claim of the U.S. being out of control in the war on terror may lead citizens, politicians, and the
military to seek out a manner in which to end our involvement and focus on our own economy here at home.
Template:
This work is significant because _______________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
The complete précis:
In a New York Times opinion article dated July 27, 2010, columnist Maureen Dowd suggests that the United
States is not in full control in the war on terror. She develops this claim by first outlining the “confounding” nature of the
U.S. war in Afghanistan. Then Ms. Dowd provides numerous anecdotes with the bottom line demonstrating that we have
been “lured into their maze” with “insurgents [who] are world class.” Maureen Dowd’s purpose is to persuade those in
government as well as U.S. citizens that this war on terror has become a “monstrous maze without a ball of string to find
our way out.” She doesn’t need to directly state her opposition to the war since she provides ample proof in the form of
data and anecdotes to call for an end to the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Ms. Dowd establishes an ominous and
pessimistic tone with her immediate audience of New York Times readers. Her credibility is well-established since she has
not only been a columnist for this newspaper but also for several national magazines. Additionally, she won a Pulitzer
Prize for her series on Bill Clinton during his controversial years as President.
The columnist begins her article with a mythological allusion to Theseus’s fight with a Minotaur in a maze.
The effect of this allusion is to establish the idea of the war in Afghanistan being compared to a puzzle in which the
11
U.S. has no clear cut solution or ending. In addition, she presents one of the great paradoxes of our involvement –
the more “we try to do for our…protectorates, they more angry they get.” She repeats this idea in paragraphs 4 and
5 with the anecdotes of Washington’s Wall Street bank bail-outs and Pakistanis “billions” and how we were then
“stabbed…in the back.” This shows that yes, indeed, our involvement in Afghanistan is another example of history
repeating itself. Finally, a hyperbole towards the end of this article presents a clear picture of the realities we face.
Ms. Dowd asserts that “we [have] pour[ed] gazillions to build up Iraq and Afghanistan even as our own economy
sputters.” The effect here is a reminder that many Americans are going through tough economic times which leads
us to ask, “Why throw good money after bad?”
This work is significant because through numerous factual anecdotes and logical reasoning, Maureen
Dowd’s claim of the U.S. being out of control in the war on terror may lead citizens, politicians, and the military to
seek out a manner in which to end our involvement and focus on our own economy here at home.
12
13
14