I. Précis Writing — Method, Compression & Worked Examples (20 marks)

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Syllabus: A carefully selected passage with an orientation of generic understanding and enough flexibility for compression is given for précising and suggesting an appropriate title. 15 marks for the précis, 5 for the title. The title alone is a quarter of the question — never leave it for the last ten seconds.

What a Précis Is (and Isn't)

A précis is a faithful, compressed restatement of the author's central argument, in your own words, in roughly one-third of the original length. It is not a summary of topics ("the author talks about…"), not a critique, and not a paraphrase of every sentence.

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🪜 How to Write a Précis — The 4-Step Exam Procedure

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This is the drill you actually perform in the hall. Steps 1–4 are the procedure; the 7-step method below is the same drill broken into finer moves and used as a checklist. Learn the four, tick the seven.

Step 1 — Read & Compartmentalise (8–10 min)

Read the passage three times. Never fewer.

Compartmentalisation is the whole trick. A 350-word passage normally breaks into 4–6 compartments. Those labels — not the passage — become your précis.

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Cross out on sight: examples, anecdotes, names and lists given as illustration, statistics used only to prove a point, quotations, rhetorical questions, repeated ideas said a second way, and figurative decoration ("oases of tranquility", "tapestry of life").

Step 2 — Fix the length, then the title (3 min)

1. Count the original. Count the words in one full line, multiply by the number of lines. Fast and accurate enough.
2. Divide by three. That is your target; ±10 words is safe. If the paper states a limit (as CSS 2026 did: 100 words), the limit overrides the one-third rule — stay within ±5.
3. Write the title now, in pencil, at the top. It is 5 of the 20 marks. Drafting it early also forces you to name the thesis before you write a single sentence. Revise it at the end if the précis drifts.

Step 3 — Draft from your labels, not from the passage (12–15 min)

• Cover the passage. Write the rough draft looking only at your margin labels. This single habit is what produces genuine paraphrase instead of stitched-together copying — the most common reason CSS candidates lose précis marks.
• Keep the author's order of logic: claim → reason → complication → conclusion.
• Join the compartments with connectors: however, consequently, therefore, whereas, since, yet.
• Third person, one tense throughout. Convert the passage's I / we to the author / people. Convert direct speech to reported speech.
• No openers like "In this passage the author says…" — start straight with the idea.

Step 4 — Trim, check, fair-copy (7–8 min)

1. Count your draft. Over target? Apply the compression toolkit below — phrase → one word, list → class noun, clause → phrase.
2. Run the checklist (Mark-Losing Mistakes, further down this page).
3. Write the fair copy in one unbroken paragraph: title on top (centred or underlined), précis beneath, and the word count in brackets at the end — (Words: 121).
4. Do not add a moral, an opinion, or a conclusion the author never reached.

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One paragraph. No bullets. No headings inside the précis. A bulleted précis is marked as "notes", not a précis, however good the content.

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The 7-Step Method (≈30–35 minutes)

1. Read once for the gist (no pen). Ask: What is the one thing the author wants me to believe?
2. Read again and mark the thesis — often in the first or last two sentences, or after a turn-word (but, yet, however, nevertheless).
3. Bracket what to cut: examples, anecdotes, statistics used only as illustration, quotations, rhetorical questions, repeated ideas, figurative flourishes.
4. Count words & fix your target. Count the original (count one line × number of lines for speed). Target = ⅓, allowed ±5–10 words. Write the count at the end of your précis: (Words: 108).
5. Outline in 4–6 note-points in your own words — this is the skeleton of the argument (claim → reason → complication → conclusion).
6. Write the rough draft from your notes, not from the passage — this is what forces genuine paraphrase. Link points with connectors (however, consequently, therefore, whereas).
7. Trim, polish, title. Cut to target, check tense/agreement, then write the fair copy with the title on top.

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Time budget in the paper: Précis 35 min · Comprehension 30 min · Grammar/Vocab 25 min · Sentence correction 10 min · Grouping 10 min · Pairs 12 min · Translation 15 min · Review 10–15 min. Total ≈ 3 hours.

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Word-Count Targets

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Compression Toolkit — Phrase → One Word

Three more compression moves:

• Generalise lists: "Rome, Athens, and Babylon" → ancient civilisations.
• Direct → reported: "'We shall never surrender,' he declared" → He vowed resistance.
• Clause → phrase: "people who live in villages" → villagers; "when he had finished his work" → after work.

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🚦 Include / Compress / Skip — The Decision Guide

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The delete test — run it on every sentence. Cover the sentence and ask: does the argument still work without it?

• Argument breaks → 🟢 INCLUDE (paraphrased)
• Argument survives but is weaker or less clear → 🟡 COMPRESS (keep the idea, shrink the words)
• Argument is exactly the same → 🔴 SKIP

Signal words to spot on the 2nd reading:

• 🟢 Include signals: but, yet, however, nevertheless, therefore, thus, hence, consequently, must, should, the real / true / chief, the remedy, in short, in fact
• 🔴 Skip signals: for example, for instance, such as, like, e.g., consider, as X said, quotation marks, question marks, numbers, capitalised names

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Two traps. (1) Never skip a qualifier. "Technology is partly to blame" and "Technology is to blame" are different arguments; dropping partly distorts the author. (2) Never compress the thesis into vagueness. "The author discusses education" keeps nothing; "Education must value reasoning over rote answers" keeps everything.

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✏️ Sample Sentence Drill — 14 Sentences, One Move Each

Cover the last column, write your own version, then compare. Tag each sentence I / C / S before you touch it.

Pattern to notice: sentences 6, 10 and 14 are the only 🟢 INCLUDE sentences, and all three carry a but / nevertheless / however. In a real passage, the turn-word sentences are almost always the ones that must survive.

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The Title (5 marks)

A good title is short (3–8 words), specific, and captures the thesis, not just the topic.

Title test: could this title sit on top of a different passage? If yes, it's too vague.

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Worked Example 1 (316 words → ≈105)

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Every age has believed that it was living through an unprecedented acceleration, yet ours has a better claim than most. The volume of information that reaches an ordinary person in a single day would have taken a scholar of the eighteenth century a month to collect. At first glance this abundance seems an unmixed blessing. Knowledge that was once locked in libraries and guarded by institutions is now available to a farmer's son with a cheap telephone, and the democratic promise of this change should not be underestimated. But abundance has a cost that is rarely counted. When information was scarce, the chief intellectual virtue was diligence: one had to search for facts, travel to find them, and copy them patiently by hand. Today the scarce resource is not information but attention, and the chief virtue has become discrimination — the ability to decide what deserves to be read, and what deserves to be ignored. A mind that responds to every notification is not well informed; it is merely busy. It skims a hundred headlines and understands none, forms opinions about matters it has not examined, and mistakes the sensation of keeping up for the substance of knowing. Nor is the damage purely individual. A public that cannot sustain attention for more than a few minutes becomes easy prey for slogans, because slogans are the only form of argument short enough to be heard. Democracy, which depends on citizens weighing competing claims, is quietly weakened when the capacity for patient thought declines. The remedy is not to retreat from technology, which would be neither possible nor desirable, but to cultivate deliberately the habits that technology discourages: reading whole books, reflecting before reacting, and admitting that some questions require more than a moment's thought. The educated person of the future will not be the one who knows the most, but the one who knows what is worth knowing.

Step 5 — note skeleton:

1. Information today is unprecedentedly abundant → real democratic benefit.
2. BUT the scarce thing is now attention; the needed virtue shifts from diligence to discrimination.
3. Constant reaction = busyness, not knowledge; illusion of understanding.
4. Social cost: short attention → slogans win → democracy weakened.
5. Remedy: not rejecting technology but consciously building deep-reading/reflective habits; education = knowing what is worth knowing.

• ✅ Model Précis + Title (click to reveal after attempting)

  Title: Attention: The Scarce Resource of the Information Age

  Modern life offers an unprecedented flood of information which, by opening knowledge once confined to libraries and institutions to ordinary people, carries real democratic promise. Yet this abundance has shifted the central intellectual challenge. Where scarcity once demanded diligence in finding facts, abundance now demands discrimination in choosing among them, since attention rather than information has become scarce. A mind that reacts to every stimulus grows busy rather than informed, confusing superficial awareness with understanding. The harm extends to society: citizens unable to concentrate fall for simplistic slogans, eroding the careful judgement democracy requires. The solution lies not in rejecting technology but in consciously nurturing deep reading and reflection, for true education will mean knowing what merits knowing. (Words: 118 — at the upper edge; the rough-work version below trims to 107)

  Why it scores: thesis kept in order; all examples (farmer's son, eighteenth-century scholar, "hundred headlines") removed; no copied clauses; no "the author says"; ends on the author's conclusion, not the student's.

🧾 Full Rough Work for Example 1 — Exactly What Goes on the Rough Sheet

This is the 25-minute middle of the 35 minutes, shown step by step. In the exam, cross the rough work out neatly with one diagonal line after writing the fair copy.

① Count and target

Original:  ≈16 words per line × 20 lines ≈ 320   (exact count: 316)
Target:    316 ÷ 3 ≈ 105     Safe range: 95–115

② Title drafts (pencil, before writing anything else)

1. The Information Age              ✗ topic only — fits any passage on technology
2. Too Much Information             ✗ vague and informal
3. Attention: The Scarce Resource of the Information Age   ✓ names the THESIS

③ Sentence triage — Include / Compress / Skip

Score: 9 include · 5 compress · 1 skip whole. Most of the cutting happens inside sentences (the farmer's son, the three verbs, the bracketed aside), not by deleting whole sentences.

④ Margin labels (the compartments)

[A] s1–4    info abundant → democratic gain
[B] s5–7    BUT attention now scarce: diligence → discrimination   ← THESIS
[C] s8–9    reacting to all = busy, not informed
[D] s10–12  society too: slogans win → democracy weakens
[E] s13–15  remedy: keep tech, build deep habits → know what matters

⑤ Rough draft 1 — written with the passage COVERED (168 words — too long)

Today people receive more information than ever before, and because knowledge that was once kept in libraries is now open to ordinary people, this change has a great democratic value. However, this abundance has a hidden cost which is not usually noticed. In the past, when information was scarce, the most important quality was diligence in searching for facts, but now that attention rather than information is scarce, the most important quality is discrimination, that is, the ability to choose what to read and what to ignore. A mind which reacts to everything becomes busy but not informed, and it confuses the feeling of keeping up with real understanding. This is also harmful for society, because people who cannot concentrate are easily misled by slogans, and so democracy, which needs careful judgement, becomes weak. The solution is not to reject technology but to develop habits of deep reading and reflection on purpose, because in the future an educated person will be one who knows what is worth knowing.

⑥ Trimming — 168 → 107

⑦ Fair copy

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Attention: The Scarce Resource of the Information Age

Information has never been so abundant, and opening knowledge to ordinary people carries democratic promise. Yet this abundance has a hidden cost. Scarcity once demanded diligence in finding facts; now that attention, not information, is scarce, the essential skill is discrimination in choosing among them. A mind reacting to every stimulus grows busy rather than informed, mistaking keeping up for understanding. Society suffers too: citizens unable to concentrate fall for slogans, weakening the careful judgement democracy needs. The remedy lies not in rejecting technology but in deliberately cultivating deep reading and reflection, since the truly educated will be those who can judge what deserves to be known. (Words: 107)

Final check against the checklist: the thesis (compartment B) is complete; all five compartments are in the author's order; no example, name or number survives; no four-word run is copied; one tense; third person; one paragraph; word count stated.

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Worked Example 2 (≈230 words → ≈77)

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In most of our schools, failure is treated as a disgrace to be hidden rather than an experience to be examined. A child who gives a wrong answer is corrected, sometimes mocked, and quickly moves on, having learnt chiefly that it is dangerous to try. The result is a generation that prefers memorising safe answers to exploring uncertain ones. Yet every discipline worth studying advanced through error. The scientist frames a hypothesis knowing that most hypotheses will be disproved; the writer drafts a page knowing that most of it will be struck out; the engineer builds a prototype precisely so that it may break under test and reveal its weaknesses. In each case the mistake is not the opposite of learning but its raw material. A teacher who understands this will ask not merely whether an answer is right, but how the student arrived at it, for a wrong answer reached by honest reasoning is often more instructive than a right one reached by rote. Examinations that reward only the final figure teach students to fear the process that produces understanding. If we want citizens capable of solving problems no textbook anticipated, we must first allow children the freedom to be wrong in the classroom, where the cost of error is small and its lessons are large.

• ✅ Model Précis + Title

  Title: Error: The Raw Material of Learning

  Our schools treat failure as shameful, teaching children to avoid risk and to prefer memorised answers over genuine inquiry. Yet progress in every field depends on error, which is the substance of learning rather than its opposite. Sound teaching therefore values the reasoning behind an answer above its mere correctness, whereas examinations that reward only results make students fear the very process that builds understanding. To produce capable problem-solvers, schools must let children err where mistakes cost little and teach much. (Words: 83)

  Note: the scientist/writer/engineer triad collapses into "every field" — the classic generalise-the-list move.

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Mark-Losing Mistakes (Checklist)

• Opening with "In this passage the author…" — wastes words and shifts to meta-commentary
• Lifting the passage's key sentences unchanged
• Keeping examples, statistics, or quotations
• Adding your own view, a moral, or a conclusion the author did not reach
• Breaking into bullets or several paragraphs
• Going well over or under ⅓ length; forgetting to state the word count
• Switching tenses mid-précis; first-person "we/I" copied from the passage
• A one-word topic title

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Recurring CSS Précis Themes (practise passages on these)

Education & learning · Democracy & citizenship · Science vs. humanities · Nature & environment · Happiness, wealth & contentment · War & peace · Leadership & character · Technology & society · Culture & civilisation · Freedom & responsibility · Literature & the reader · Work, leisure & dignity of labour

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Practice loop: pick an editorial from Dawn/The News or an essay by a classic author (Russell, Huxley, Orwell) → 30-minute timed précis → compare against the original's thesis → log every copied phrase in Weak areas on the hub page.

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📜 CSS Past Papers 2020–2026 — Précis Solved

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How to use: open the paper PDF, write your own précis in 30–35 min, then open the model below and mark yourself with the rubric above. Pattern since 2020: literature/criticism (2020, 2021), history/culture (2022), education philosophy (2023), environment (2024), dense philosophy (2025), social history with a fixed word limit of 100 (2026). Always check the instruction for a word limit — 2026 introduced one.

CSS 2020 — Manto (≈290 words → ≈100)

Opens: "Manto was a victim of some kind of social ambivalence…"

• Model title + précis

  Title: Manto: The Unflinching Realist

  Manto fell prey to a society marked by self-righteousness, hypocrisy and dullness. His critics branded his work obscene and dragged him into a long legal battle, yet he stood firm in depicting life's harsh truths, however offensive to self-appointed moralists. Like Freud, he treated sex concretely, out of sympathy for the downtrodden — labourers, pimps and prostitutes. For him man was both angel and devil, and his ordinary characters behave like real people. Free of pretended virtue, he engaged readers on vital moral issues and was most troubled by the gulf between appearance and reality across classes. Handling vulgarity without being vulgar, he, like Joyce and Lawrence, mirrored the restlessness of his age. (≈115 words)

  Marker's note: keep "angel/devil" and "appearance vs reality" — they are the author's thesis; drop the list of names except two.

CSS 2021 — Nizar Hassan's My Grandfather's Path (≈330 → ≈110)

Opens: "Nizar Hassan was born in 1960…"

• Model title + précis

  Title: Art as Salvation from Hatred

  Nizar Hassan, a Palestinian filmmaker from near Nazareth, turned from anthropology and television to cinema; his film Independence exposed the absurdity of Israel calling its seizure of another people's homeland "independence". As Israel prepared to annex more Palestinian land, the author received Hassan's new documentary, My Grandfather's Path, and found it a blessing. Those who fight an enemy risk becoming like it: consumed by rage at the occupation, they may forget their own ideals. Palestinian and world art has long rescued the author from this trap, reminding him that politics exists for a higher, poetic redemption. Hassan's long, patient and masterly film, an epic tribute to his homeland, restored that perspective and deserves to be watched whole, like a pilgrimage. (≈125 words)

  Trap: the passage is written in the first person ("I received"). Convert to third person — "the author".

CSS 2022 — Oracles of Ancient Greece (≈350 → ≈120)

Q.2: Write a précis of the following passage and suggest a suitable title. (20)

• 📄 Full original passage (click to open — write your own précis first)

  The fear of human being when faced with the mysteries of life and their weakness by comparison with the vastness of nature created in them a need to communicate with the divine, with the supervisor powers which they believed regulated the universe and determined their own fates. Knowledge for wishes of the gods was always a sure guide for human behavior. In ancient Greece, the precise nature of these wishes was 'decoded' by the art of giving oracles, practiced by soothsayers who had the gift of understanding the signs or signals sent by the gods.

  The soothsayers uttered their oracles by interpreting flashes of lightening, rolls of thunder or the flights of certain birds of prey (omens); alternatively, they might observe the direction in which the fire burned when a sacrifice was made, examine the entrails of animals which had just been sacrificed, or base judgments on the sacrificial beast's willingness to approach the altar. The interpretation of dreams was popular too, and so was palmistry. The most notable soothsayers of ancient Greece were Tiresias, Calchas, Helenus, Amphioxus and Cassandra.

  However, there were abundant instances in which the gods did not manifest themselves to the faithful in the forms of signs but spoke directly to an intermediate who for a short time was overcome by a 'divine mania' and transcended his own human essence. Here the prophet — or more usually the prophetess — entered a state of ecstasy in which he or she delivered the message from the gods to the suppliants.

  These practices for foreseeing the future were the basis on which the ancient Greek oracles operated. Each oracle was located within a properly-organized sanctuary and was directly associated with one or other of the gods. Apollo was the archetypal soothsayer for the Greeks, the god who was responsible for conveying to mortals the decisions pronounced by Zeus. The most important of all the oracles, that at Delphi, delivered the message with the intervention of Apollo, while the oldest, that of Dodona, functioned with the assistance of Zeus.

  (≈340 words → target ≈113, acceptable 105–125)

Step 1 applied — the five compartments:

• Model title + précis

  Title: Divine Guidance: The Oracles of Ancient Greece

  Awed by life's mysteries and feeling weak before nature, humans sought contact with the gods they believed governed the universe and their fates, for knowing divine will guided conduct. In ancient Greece, soothsayers such as Tiresias and Cassandra read that will in omens — lightning, thunder, birds of prey — in sacrificial fire and entrails, and in dreams and palms. At other times the gods spoke directly through a prophet, usually a woman, seized by divine frenzy. These practices underpinned the Greek oracles, each housed in an organised sanctuary and tied to a god. Apollo, who conveyed Zeus's decisions to mortals, presided over the foremost oracle at Delphi, while the oldest, at Dodona, served Zeus himself. (Words: 116)

  Why it scores: all four compartments survive in the author's order; the five names and three of the five omens are gone; "divine mania / transcended his own human essence" is compressed to "seized by divine frenzy"; not one clause is lifted unchanged; the conclusion (Delphi foremost, Dodona oldest) is kept because it is the author's endpoint.

  Traps in this passage: (1) don't list all five soothsayers or every omen — two examples each are enough; (2) "supervisor powers" simply restates "the divine" — say it once; (3) the passage is descriptive, not argumentative, so the title must name the subject with its significance ("Divine Guidance…"), not just "Greek Oracles".

CSS 2023 — Freedom in Education (Bertrand Russell) (≈370 → ≈120)

Opens: "On the question of freedom in education there are at present three main schools of thought…"

• Model title + précis

  Title: Freedom and Authority in Education

  Three views divide opinion on freedom in education: complete freedom whatever the child's conduct, complete authority whatever his merit, and freedom joined with an expectation of constant goodness. The last, though popular, is illogical, since freedom no more makes children virtuous than it does adults; this Rousseauist faith fails under observation. Its followers would deny education any positive aim beyond room for spontaneous growth. The author rejects this as over-individualistic and careless of knowledge. Communities need cooperation that impulse alone cannot supply, and large populations survive only through science and technique, which education must transmit. Even the most liberal educators owe their success to disciplined qualities that unchecked freedom cannot produce. Education must therefore offer growth together with the mental and moral equipment children cannot acquire alone. (≈130 words)

  Key to marks: the author's own position (last two sentences) must survive compression.

CSS 2024 — Urban Green Spaces (≈280 → ≈95)

Opens: "In the heart of bustling cities, urban green spaces stand as oases of tranquility…"

• Model title + précis

  Title: Urban Green Spaces: The Lungs of the City

  Parks and green spaces give city dwellers calm amid the bustle, shelter wildlife and balance development with conservation. They also strengthen communities by hosting family outings, sport and cultural events. Beyond leisure, they clean the air, reduce urban heat and support physical and mental well-being. The challenge is to protect them from expanding urbanisation; sustainable planning — parks, tree-lined streets and green roofs — must let concrete and nature coexist. Preserving these spaces is a shared duty so that cities grow in harmony with the environment. (≈90 words)

  Trap: the passage is decorative ("oases of tranquility", "tapestry of city life"). Strip the imagery; keep the four ideas: respite, community, health/environment, planning.

CSS 2025 — Nationalism and Humanism (Bhabha, Al-Ghazali, Iqbal) (≈800 → ≈240)

Opens: "Homi K. Bhabha, a prominent postcolonial scholar, advances…"

• Model title + précis

  Title: Nationalism: A Double-Edged Sword

  Homi Bhabha argues that nations, like narratives, are imagined constructs whose origins are lost in myth. Shaped by historical accident, ethnicity and regional loyalty, national identities can become rigid and exclusive, opposing the humanism upheld from Socrates and Plato to Goethe, Rousseau, Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd. Al-Ghazali balanced love of one's land with justice for all citizens and universal with local values, offering inclusive citizenship as a remedy for exclusivist nationalism; Bhabha likewise urges a global citizenship that places shared humanity above narrow interest. Yet nationalism has often narrowed outlooks, breeding an aggressive patriotism that silences dissent and, chameleon-like, slides into xenophobia. Its record over the last century is mixed: nations have embraced pluralism and equality, but the urge to dominate, echoing Ratzel's theory of organic borders, still erupts in violence, as in Bosnia and Palestine. Disillusionment deepens when democracy seems a mask for imperialism, as Iqbal warned; blind devotion to the nation breeds historical short-sightedness and dictatorship and imprisons the human spirit. Democracy may be nationalism's safest carrier, yet weak nations, bullied by the strong, are left with little but patriotic slogans. Born of imperialism, nationalism left the colonised to struggle for self-determination alone. Like Herder's Volksgeist, it can unite or divide depending on its use; hence a restrained approach is needed that reconciles national pride with universal values and human rights. (≈240 words)

  Trap: 2025's instruction was "Distil" — same task. With a long passage, group the thinkers into two camps (humanist balance vs domination) instead of summarising each one.

CSS 2026 — Rise of the Working Man (100 words fixed)

Opens: "One of the outstanding features of the century has been the improvement of living of working man…"

• Model title + précis

  Title: The Rise of the Working Class

  A key feature of this century is the working man's improved condition: more political power, wealth, leisure, health care, security and education. Earlier societies were split between a comfortable, idle ruling minority and a toiling, powerless majority, with slaves at the very bottom. The Industrial Revolution made workers resent their poverty, while owners, needing skilled labour, learned that goodwill was essential. Since workers could choose employers, good employers attracted the best, forcing standards upward. Trade unions and strikes accelerated reform. With conditions now better, strikes have declined, and both sides recognise their mutual dependence. (≈95 words)

  Rule: when a limit is given, stay within ±5 words and write the count at the end.