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:
- Introduce the story by title and the author’s name (“The short story, ‘The Necklace,’ by Guy de Maupassant is about….”).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
© 2024, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.
