History 301

Devine/Arrowsmith

Fall 2012

Writing a Précis

Your Assignment

You are to write a 1200-word, double-spaced, précis of either Donaldson, The First Modern Campaign or White, Missiles in Cuba (Due Tuesday, October 16^th by 11:59 pm).

You may email me the précis as an attachment, turn it in to the History Department office (Sierra Tower 610) during business hours (8 am – 5 pm), or hand it to me in class.

Guidelines for Writing a Precis

A précis, as I am defining it, differs from a book review in that it does not evaluate or critique the author’s work. A précis simply states a book’s thesis or argument and summarizes its content.

The basic model you should follow in writing your précis is as follows:

1) At the top of the précis should be the author’s name, the book title, place of publication, name of publisher, and year of publication. For example,

Mark White, Missiles in Cuba: Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro and the 1962 Crisis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998)

2) First paragraph: an overall statement on what the book is about; how the author structures the book (for example, are chapters chronological or does each chapter address a different theme); and a brief statement of the author’s thesis or argument. You might also think of the thesis as the author’s purpose for writing the book (the author often states his or her purpose explicitly in the preface or introduction).

3) Each succeeding paragraph should summarize the content of one chapter. If the chapters are all approximately the same length, it makes sense for all the chapter summaries to be approximately the same length as well. Therefore, if you are writing a 1200-word précis and the book has 10 chapters, each chapter summary should be about 120 words.

4) At the end of the précis you may want to offer a sentence or two conclusion that ties together all the material you have summarized and make some statement about the book’s value for a reader interested in learning more about the topic the book addresses.