Summary Writing, Report/ Article Writing

A newspaper editor is handed a thousand-word press release and told to fit the story into two hundred words for tomorrow’s front page. A moot court secretary is asked to tell the committee, in writing, what actually happened at last month’s meeting. Neither is being asked to have an opinion — both are being asked to take someone else’s material and reshape it for a reader who was not there. That is what précis, report and article writing all have in common, and it is why this topic is graded almost entirely on whether you have kept faith with the source, not on how creative you can be with it.

In two minutes

Précis writing compresses a given passage to about a third of its length in your own words plus a title; report writing gives a factual, third-person account of an event or activity with a clear structure; article writing does the same for a general reader in a slightly more personal voice — and in this paper, précis is by far the most frequently tested of the three.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of English – II on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.