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What is the difference between a precis and an abstract?


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Well, I don't know about the one used over the other part, but I thought the difference was that when writing an abstract, you didn't have to put the whole thing in your own words. I taught abstract writing as part of learning to take study notes and paraphrasing and summary writing as part of learning to take notes for a research paper or as a way to make sure you really understood a concept. We never did get to learning to write a good precis. I liked working with abstracts because I always found it frustrating (as a student) to have to take a well written phrase and rewrite it poorly in my own words. I guess if my teachers had been more clever, they would have given us poorly written things to paraphrase, or things so complicated that it was obvious why we should practise narrating it back in our own words.This, by the way, is an absolutely key academic skill that I wish I had spent more time working on with my children. I got it right with youngest but older two were seriously skimped.

 

Hopefully somebody will give you a better answer.

 

: )Nan

 

ETA (which scrambles some of the formatting - sorry) - I have vague memories of being taught to write an abstract of my own research paper, to include as part of that research paper, and of writing précis (or summaries) when I was writing about somebody else's work and wanted to bring my readers up to speed, but I could have this wrong. As I said, hopefully somebody else will chime in here.

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A précis is usually a much longer summary, rarely using actual quotes from the book.  Examples are used, but reworded, and simple footnotes are used.  Also - there is usually some sort of personal opinion given of the work by the person writing the précis, and other works on similar topics are used as both positive and negative comparisons. 

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I don't think the type of article really matters.  The outcome or goal of the assignment would really make the difference.  Maybe think of a précis as a miniature literature review (meaning the kind of lit review seen in the beginning of a graduate thesis - comparing all of the sources used for the paper). 

So - if you want him to read and summarize the article only - an abstract.  If you want him to read, summarize, critique, and then critically compare the article to other articles of a similar nature - précis. 

Does that make sense?

I've done a précis for both history and science articles, so it really isn't genre specific.

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