A précis is simply an editing of someone else’s material that attempts to combine completeness of information with a stringent length limitation. In general, students can be asked to reduce a passage to 1/3 or even 1/5 its original length while retaining all the passage’s details and losing no important ideas. You can pick an article or a short section of the text. Précis work demands that students understand what they have read and can reveal which students are having difficulty navigating within academic prose. It also forces students to do some of the work that revision involves (editing out repetitive sentences, condensing unnecessary wordiness, creating more incisive prose).