Writing Assignment: How to write a précis

This is a high school writing assignment given to help students prepare for writing college-level academic critical essays.

You are a lowly intern in the script department of a major movie studio. Every week, hundreds of short story manuscripts flood in from writers and agents, hoping that one of theirs will be plucked from the mountain of paper and turned into a major motion picture. Those decisions are not yours, of course. The studio’s highly paid producers make those decisions. Unfortunately, their time is far too expensive to sit around reading short stories from pathetic nobodies like Uber drivers and English teachers. Besides, they don’t like reading very much. You, however, are only paid with free donuts and coffee for breakfast and have plenty of time when you’re not running errands for said producers–dropping off and picking up their dry cleaning, washing their cars, or carrying their clubs during their Wednesday afternoon golf outings–so it falls on you to read the stories for them. You are then to provide what is known as a précis (pronounced “pray see”). It must not exceed two double-spaced pages. Producers have short attention spans. You are not to express any opinion at all about whether you like the story or not. You are a lowly intern; your opinion doesn’t matter. Instead, you are to do the following:

  1. Introduce the story by title and the author’s name (“The short story, ‘The Necklace,’ by Guy de Maupassant is about….”).
  2. Summarize the plot. Write in the present tense as if the action is happening in front of you (“Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning…”). If there is a flashback, then you may use past tense to summarize that, but return to present tense when the flashback is over.
  3. Under no circumstance should you take on the voice of the narrator of the story, whether it is first or third person. Your voice must be clinical and your tone neutral.
  4. Follow the summary with some brief profiles of the major characters in the story. Nothing in-depth, just a well-rendered sentence or two will do. The casting department will use this to decide what actors might be right for the parts, and they don’t want to be constrained by specifics. They may, for example, want to be able to cast either Tom Cruise or Whoopi Goldberg for a particular role.
  5. Finish the essay with some suggestions of what some of the major themes might be. Again, nothing too complex–producers don’t like thematic complexity. It tires them out, and they can’t go to the gym to workout with their personal trainers. Provide at least one theme and explain it in one or two sentences.

Write this précis as a short essay, not an outline. Again, no opinion, no judgement, no feelings. No one cares how it made you feel. This is business, not personal. If the précis contains one single “I”, your free donuts and coffee we be revoked.

Note: you can type the accented e in google docs by typing <alt> 0233 on the numeric keypad. If you have trouble with this, just type a regular “e” and I’ll clean it up after you hand it in.

Attached is the story for you to work with. In French, by the way, the proper name “Guy” is pronounced “Gee.” This should satisfy the educational requirement for your internship to qualify for academic credit.

Warning: This is a well-known literary work, and you can find hundreds of summaries on the internet. If you submit one of them, you will be caught, and losing your coffee and donuts will be the least of your worries.

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The Wedding Guest

Originally published in Ginosko Literary Journal(2020).

In the sixties, when I was still in elementary school, retail businesses in the city stayed open later than they do now. Most stores closed at about 7:30 or 8:00. Drug stores, however, stayed open until at least 10:00. I remember summer nights when my friends, mostly Irish-Catholic kids from the apartment building up the street, and I would play on the sidewalk of Corona Avenue. For weeks on end, every night, we would ride our bicycles on the sidewalk, up and down the block, up over the bridge that crossed the Long Island Railroad, and then back all the way down Corona Avenue to Junction Boulevard, where the name of the neighborhood changes from Elmhurst to Corona. Then, one night, one of the kids would come out with their roller skates instead of their bicycles, and we would start roller skating for a few weeks. Then, we would switch back to bicycles.

Whenever we would pass in front of my father’s store on those nights, we could see a group of three or four men standing in the front by the plate-glass window, drinking coffee from the deli across the street, swapping stories. One guy was a short, fat bald guy who chewed a cigar and always had a newspaper of some kind folded up under his hairy arm. His name was Casey. He had a deep, gravelly voice and he liked to play the ponies. He drove a cream-colored Caddy that he parked in a no-parking zone across the street. I never knew what he did for a living, but I’m sure it was at least partially legitimate.

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The RIF

I read this excerpt from a much longer story at my graduate reading at  Vermont College of Fine Arts in July of 2019.  The entire story was later published as a chapbook by Blue Cubicle Press.

Saturday

Dietrich’s plate is full. Actually, it’s overflowing. He’s got juice from the baked beans running into the coleslaw and off the plate. The chicken wings are sitting on top of the potato salad, and two ribs have bailed out and tumbled onto the table. It’s the annual employee picnic at the CEO’s favorite country club, and he’s trying to make the most of it. I’m nursing a warm, watery gin and tonic, feeling my hangover coming on in the heat, and I’m late for my daughter’s dance recital.

“It will probably be Thursday,” he says. He bites into an uncut gherkin and the juice squirts across the table onto my plate. There’s a smudge from the potato salad on the corner of his drooping mustache. “The personnel files when to legal yesterday.” I ask him why. He shoves the severed end of the pickle in his mouth and mashes down on it as his eyes dart over my face and the sun glares off his sweaty bald head. We’re supposed to be peers, but he’s a well-connected bottom feeder, the kind that always carries a clipboard. I don’t trust this motherfucker and he knows it.

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