Student Writing Handbook Fifth+Edition

Précis 291

Précis

The Forest Products Laboratory, a research institution of the United States Forest Service, sug-

gests over 5,000 uses for wood, but admittedly no one knows how to set the limits of specificity

for the list. For instance, some wood fiber products alone can boast over 25,000 uses, includ-

ing dolls’ eyes and billboards. In another example, wood supplies annually over 73 million tons

of paper and board, used for everything from containers to newsprint, amounting to over 40%

of paper use.

ANALYSIS of THE SAMPLE WoRkPLACE WRITING

The précis achieves the usual goals of a summary and does some additional things as
well. Notice these characteristics:

-^ It reduces the original by about two-thirds.
-^ While it includes several specific examples (dolls’ eyes, billboards, containers to
newsprint), it mostly confines itself to main ideas.
-^ Statistics and sources are considered key words and thus appear in the précis
just as they did in the original.
-^ The writer has achieved some organizational patterns not evident in the original
and has used transitions to clarify relationships. Note particularly the transitions
for instance and in another example that alert the reader to examples of how
hard it is to quantify the uses of wood. Thus, the précis-writer achieves what the
author of the original passage did not, helping the reader reach a conclusion
about the various facts and figures.