Precis writing is the most quietly decisive question on the English paper of almost every judicial service examination. It rewards exactly the habit a judge spends a career building: reading a long, argumentative, sometimes meandering text and restating its essence in a fraction of the words, without distortion, without padding, and without the writer's own opinion creeping in. The word itself is French (precis, meaning precise or cut short), and the discipline it demands is the same one the Supreme Court repeatedly asks of its own judges when it warns against prolix, unreadable judgments. On the exam, a precis is usually worth between 10 and 30 marks; lose them through a careless word count or a smuggled-in opinion and you forfeit an easy scoring opportunity that needs no case memory at all. This chapter sets out what a precis is, the rules that govern it, the mechanical traps that cost marks, and a fully worked model you can imitate under time pressure.
What a precis is — and what it is not
A precis is a faithful, self-contained summary of a passage, written in your own words, reduced to roughly one-third of the original length, and reproducing every essential idea in the same logical order while discarding everything inessential. The four classical virtues a precis must display are brevity, clarity, coherence and fidelity to the original. Brevity is the compression; clarity is the readability; coherence is the connected flow; fidelity is the promise that you have added nothing and removed nothing that mattered.
It is easier to learn the form by ruling out what it is not. A precis is not a paraphrase: a paraphrase restates a passage at roughly the same length, whereas a precis cuts it to a third. It is not a comprehension answer: comprehension picks selected facts to answer specific questions, while a precis must capture the whole. It is not a commentary or a review: you never evaluate, agree, disagree, praise or condemn the original — your task is the author's meaning, not your reaction to it. And it is not a collage of borrowed sentences: lifting the author's own phrases wholesale defeats the exercise and is penalised. The instinct a precis trains — strip the argument to its skeleton and state it plainly — is precisely the instinct the Supreme Court demanded in Anil Rai v. State of Bihar, (2001) 7 SCC 318, where it criticised judgments that bury their reasoning in delay and verbosity and insisted that a decision must be intelligible and reach the reader cleanly. A good precis writer and a good judgment writer share one creed: say what is necessary, and stop.
This chapter sits within the wider English for Judiciary syllabus, where the same instinct for exact expression governs everything from subject-verb agreement to the controlled use of active and passive voice.
Why the judiciary examines precis writing
The examiners are not idly testing your vocabulary. Precis writing maps directly onto the day-to-day craft of a judicial officer. A trial judge reads voluminous pleadings, depositions and written submissions, then must distil them into a concise statement of facts, issues and findings in the judgment. A magistrate framing a charge must reduce a sprawling chargesheet to a precise allegation. An appellate court summarising the rival contentions before answering them is, in substance, writing a precis of each side's case. The skill the paper rewards is therefore vocational, not ornamental.
The Supreme Court has, time and again, made compression a professional virtue rather than a stylistic preference. In Anil Rai v. State of Bihar, (2001) 7 SCC 318, the Court laid down time-bound guidelines for the delivery of judgments precisely because sprawling, delayed reasoning erodes confidence in the institution. Commentators describe the recurring tendency to write three-hundred-page judgments as a 'prolixity syndrome', and the Court's own Landmark Judgment Summaries exist so that readers can grasp a holding without wading through the full text — an institutional admission that compression has value. A candidate who can compress accurately is signalling, to an examiner who is usually a sitting or retired judge, that they already think the way the bench wants its officers to think.
There is also a purely tactical reason to take the precis seriously. Unlike a substantive law answer, a precis needs no remembered citation, no statutory section, no doctrinal nuance. Every mark is available to anyone who follows the rules carefully. In a paper where law questions can swing on a forgotten provision, the precis is the most controllable scoring block you have.
The one-third rule and word count discipline
The single most examined mechanical rule is length: a precis should be approximately one-third the length of the original passage. If the passage runs to 450 words, your precis should be near 150; for 600 words, near 200. Most papers state the target length expressly (for example, 'in about 120 words') or print the passage's word count, and many supply a grid of boxes in which you must write one word per box. Where the paper gives an explicit target, that target governs; the one-third guide is the fallback when none is stated.
Two disciplines follow. First, count and declare. You must write the precis to the stated length, then note the actual word count at the end, conventionally in parentheses or after the title. Examiners cross-check this figure, and a false count is worse than an honest one. Second, respect the tolerance. A small margin — commonly taken as about ten per cent either side, though some bodies allow only five — is permitted, but a precis that is half the passage's length (you have summarised nothing) or barely shorter than it (you have merely copied) will be heavily penalised regardless of how elegant the prose is. Length is not a soft target; on many marking schemes it is the first thing checked, and a gross overshoot caps your score before the examiner even reads for quality.
A practical method for hitting the count: write a first draft from your underlined points without watching the length, then count, then prune. Pruning a long draft to size produces tighter writing than padding a thin one. Compound several words into one wherever the language allows — 'at this point in time' becomes 'now', 'in the event that' becomes 'if', 'a large number of' becomes 'many'. This kind of lexical compression, the same economy that good legal drafting prizes, is where most of your word savings will come from.
The core rules of a good precis
Beyond length, a cluster of settled rules governs the form. Examiners apply them almost as a checklist, so internalising them is the fastest route to full marks.
Use your own words. A precis must be a genuine restatement, not a stitching-together of the author's sentences. Technical terms with no plain synonym (a statute's name, a proper noun, an established term of art) may of course be retained, but ordinary phrasing must be recast. Include only the essential. Examples, illustrations, statistics offered merely as support, rhetorical questions, repetitions and digressions are stripped out; what survives is the chain of main ideas. Preserve the original order and proportion. The ideas appear in the sequence the author chose, and an idea the author dwells on is not collapsed into a clause while a passing remark is expanded. Add nothing. No new fact, no inference the author did not draw, and above all no opinion of your own — neither agreement nor criticism. Write as a single connected whole. A precis is normally one unbroken paragraph (a long one may be split, but never into the original's many paragraphs), with logical connectives carrying the reader from idea to idea. Stay grammatically self-contained. A reader who has never seen the original must be able to read your precis and understand it completely, which means resolving every pronoun and supplying any antecedent the original assumed.
The fidelity rule deserves emphasis because it is the one most often broken under pressure. A precis that imports the writer's reaction has stopped being a precis and become an editorial. The discipline is the same one the Supreme Court enforces when it distinguishes what a judgment actually decides from loose observations around it: in State of U.P. v. Synthetics & Chemicals Ltd., (1991) 4 SCC 139, the Court held that a conclusion reached without argument or reasoning passes sub silentio and is not the 'law declared' — a reminder that only the essential, reasoned core carries weight, and the incidental falls away. A precis demands the same separation of the load-bearing from the decorative.
Writing the title
Almost every judicial-service precis question requires a title, and many candidates throw away an easy mark by neglecting it or writing a clumsy one. The title is a short label that captures the central theme of the passage — typically a phrase of two to six words, not a full sentence. 'The Need for Judicial Reform' is a good title; 'This Passage Discusses Why Judicial Reform Is Needed' is not, because it is a sentence and it announces itself rather than naming the theme.
Choose the title only after you have understood the whole passage, never from the opening lines alone, because the author's real subject often emerges late. The title should be neutral and faithful — it names the topic, it does not pass judgment on it. Conventionally the title is written above the precis and is not counted within the word limit (though if the paper says otherwise, follow the paper). A precise, well-judged title also functions as a signal to the examiner that you grasped the passage as a unified whole before you began compressing it, which colours how the rest of your precis is read.
Think of the title as a headnote to your own summary. The Supreme Court's practice illustrates the parallel: a reporter's headnote condenses an entire judgment into a few lines, yet the Court itself has been careful to note that such summaries 'do not form part of the Court's decision or reasons and are not for use in legal proceedings'. The headnote labels; it does not decide. Your precis title performs the same labelling role — it orients the reader, but the substance lives in the body below it.
Indirect speech, person and tense
A precis is written from the outside, reporting the author rather than impersonating them, and this controls person and tense. The standard convention is the third person and, in most cases, the past tense, because you are reporting what the author said. If the original reads 'I believe we must reform our courts', the precis reports it as 'the author believed that the courts had to be reformed' — first-person 'I' and 'we' become third-person references to the author, and the reported clause shifts back in tense.
This is the grammar of indirect (reported) speech, and a precis is, at bottom, an extended exercise in it. The mechanical shifts are worth rehearsing: present tense moves to past ('is' to 'was', 'has' to 'had'), 'will' moves to 'would', 'can' to 'could', 'now' to 'then', 'here' to 'there', 'today' to 'that day', and first- and second-person pronouns are recast in the third person to match the new reporting standpoint. There is an important exception: a statement of a permanent or universal truth keeps its present tense even in reported form — 'the author noted that water boils at 100 degrees', not 'boiled'. A precis of a passage about an enduring principle may therefore legitimately remain in the present.
Mishandling these shifts is one of the commonest avoidable errors. The mechanics overlap heavily with the wider grammar you revise elsewhere in this section — the backshift rules sit on top of a firm grasp of tenses and their usage, and the pronoun recasting depends on clean control of parts of speech. A candidate who is shaky on either will leak marks on every precis they write, however well they grasp the main ideas.
A reliable step-by-step method
Under examination pressure, a fixed procedure prevents panic and protects marks. The following six-step method is the one most coaching for judicial services teaches, refined to what actually works in the hall.
Step 1 — Read for the whole. Read the passage once, quickly, without a pen, purely to grasp its overall drift and tone. Do not start underlining yet; the first reading is for orientation. Step 2 — Read for the structure. Read again, slowly, this time underlining the topic sentence of each paragraph and the key ideas, and striking through examples, repetitions and digressions. By the end of this reading you should be able to state the author's central thesis in one sentence to yourself. Step 3 — Fix the title. Settle the theme and write a short, faithful title. Step 4 — Draft. Working only from your underlined points, write a first draft in your own words, in the third person and the appropriate tense, as a single connected paragraph, without yet worrying about exact length. Step 5 — Count and prune. Count the words. Trim to the target by compressing phrases and cutting any idea that, on reflection, was not essential — never by deleting an essential idea to save space. Step 6 — Revise and verify. Read the precis on its own, as if you had never seen the passage, and check four things: that it makes complete sense standing alone, that it contains no opinion of yours, that grammar and tense are consistent, and that the declared word count is honest. Then write the final fair copy.
The discipline of separating reading from writing is what distinguishes a controlled precis from a hurried one. Candidates who begin summarising during the first reading invariably over-weight the opening of the passage and run out of words before the author's real conclusion. Read fully, then write — the same order in which a careful judgment is composed.
Common mistakes that cost marks
Most precis marks are lost not through poor English but through predictable, mechanical errors. Knowing the list lets you self-audit in the last two minutes.
Wrong length. The commonest fault is a precis far too long or, less often, too short. A precis at two-thirds of the original has summarised nothing; one at a tenth has omitted essentials. Copying the author's sentences. Lifting phrases verbatim instead of recasting them is penalised even when the chosen sentences are well written. Smuggling in opinion. Words like 'rightly', 'unfortunately', 'as everyone knows' or 'this excellent argument' betray your own voice and breach the fidelity rule. Omitting the title or word count. Both are required, both are quick, and both are routinely forgotten. Including examples and illustrations. The supporting detail the author offered to prove a point is exactly what a precis discards; retaining it wastes words you cannot spare.
Distorting the meaning. Over-compression can flip an author's qualified claim into an absolute one — 'some judges have been criticised' must not become 'judges are corrupt'. A precis that misstates the original is worse than one that merely runs long, because it has failed at its one essential duty. Breaking it into many paragraphs. A precis is a single connected whole; reproducing the original's paragraph breaks shows you have not synthesised the material. Inconsistent tense or person. Drifting between past and present, or between 'the author' and 'I', signals careless reported-speech handling. Beginning with a clause like 'This passage says that...'. The precis should state the substance directly, not announce that it is a precis. Run through this list before you write your fair copy and you will recover marks that pure writing ability would never have earned you.
Language, register and economy
The prose of a precis should be plain, formal and economical. This is not the place for flourish: short declarative sentences, precise verbs, and connectives that carry the argument forward ('therefore', 'however', 'because', 'although') do the work. The register stays neutral and impersonal throughout, matching the reporting standpoint.
Economy is achieved largely by replacing phrases with words. A precis writer constantly asks whether a clause can become a phrase and a phrase a single word: 'in spite of the fact that' is 'although'; 'due to the fact that' is 'because'; 'has the ability to' is 'can'; 'a sufficient amount of' is 'enough'. Each substitution buys you space to keep another essential idea. Prefer the active voice where it is shorter and clearer, but do not force it — reported summary often reads naturally in a mixed voice, and a clumsy active construction is no improvement on a clean passive one.
Two finer points reward attention. First, watch your articles and prepositions when you recast sentences, because rewriting in your own words is exactly where small grammatical slips creep in. Second, keep the author's tone faithfully: if the original is cautious and tentative, your precis must not sound confident and emphatic. Compression changes the length, never the stance. The Supreme Court's repeated insistence that a judgment be both concise and accurate captures the balance a precis must strike — compress hard, but never at the cost of truth.
A worked example
The method is best seen in operation. Consider the following short passage of about 150 words:
"It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied, and few institutions illustrate this truth more sharply than the courts. When a litigant waits ten or fifteen years for a decision, the victory, when it finally comes, is hollow; witnesses have died, memories have faded, and the parties have grown old in the shadow of the dispute. Reformers have proposed many remedies — more judges, more courtrooms, fixed timelines for judgments, and greater use of technology — but none of these will succeed unless the deeper culture of adjournment is addressed. So long as lawyers can secure repeated postponements almost for the asking, and so long as courts treat such requests as routine rather than exceptional, the machinery of justice will continue to move at a pace that mocks the very idea of a remedy. The problem, in the end, is not merely one of resources but of attitude."
A faithful one-third precis (about 50 words) might read:
Title: Delay and the Culture of Adjournment
The author argued that judicial delay rendered eventual victory meaningless, and that proposed reforms such as more judges and fixed timelines would fail unless the underlying culture of routine adjournment was confronted. The real problem, he concluded, lay not in resources but in attitude. (45 words)
Notice what the precis did: it dropped the vivid illustrations (dead witnesses, faded memories, ageing parties) because they were support, not substance; it kept the author's logical spine — delay defeats remedy, surface reforms are insufficient, the cause is cultural — in the original order; it shifted to the third person and past tense; it added no opinion of its own; and it declared an honest count. That is the whole discipline, applied. Practise it on judgment headnotes, editorial columns and statutory objects-and-reasons clauses, and the form will become automatic well before the examination.
Precis, summary, abstract and paraphrase distinguished
Candidates frequently conflate four related forms, and examiners occasionally test the distinction directly. A precis is a faithful, proportionate compression of an entire passage to about one-third, in your own words, with a title and a declared length, preserving order and tone. A summary is a looser term for any shortened restatement; every precis is a summary, but not every summary obeys the precis rules of fixed length, single paragraph and faithful order. An abstract is the highly condensed account placed at the head of a research paper or report; it is shorter even than a precis and is often selective rather than comprehensive. A paraphrase restates a passage in different words at roughly the same length and is used to clarify, not to compress.
For the judicial-service paper, the operative form is almost always the precis, with its strict length and faithfulness requirements. But understanding the family helps you read instructions correctly: a question that asks you to 'summarise in your own words in about 100 words' is, in substance, asking for a precis and should be answered to precis standards, whereas one that asks you to 'explain the following passage' is asking for paraphrase and expansion, not compression. Reading the rubric precisely — itself a comprehension skill — is the first mark on offer.
How to practise and revise
Precis writing improves only with repetition, and the good news is that the raw material is everywhere. Take any editorial, a passage of legal commentary, the objects-and-reasons clause of a statute, or the headnote-and-facts portion of a reported judgment, and reduce it to a third under a timer. Then check yourself against the rules: right length, own words, no opinion, faithful order, title present, count declared. Keep a personal list of the phrase-to-word substitutions you find — your own compression dictionary — and it will speed every future attempt.
Two refinements raise a competent precis to a high-scoring one. First, practise the reported-speech mechanics in isolation until the tense and pronoun shifts are automatic; the candidate who has to think about 'will' becoming 'would' mid-sentence loses both time and accuracy. Second, practise reading for structure — identifying the topic sentence of each paragraph and the single-sentence thesis of the whole — because a precis is only as good as the reading that precedes it. These habits sit alongside the rest of your English for Judiciary revision, and the grammatical control they require — clean subject-verb agreement, accurate tenses, correct prepositions — is exactly the control the law papers reward in your judgment-writing answers. Mastering the precis is, in the end, training for the bench.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a precis be?
Approximately one-third the length of the original passage, unless the paper states an explicit target (such as 'in about 120 words'), in which case the stated target governs. A small tolerance, commonly around ten per cent either side, is allowed, but a gross overshoot or undershoot is penalised before the examiner even assesses quality. Always count the words and declare the figure at the end.
Do I have to write a title for my precis?
Yes, in almost all judicial-service papers a title is required and carries marks. It should be a short faithful phrase of two to six words naming the central theme, not a full sentence, and it is chosen only after reading the whole passage. The title is conventionally written above the precis and not counted in the word limit unless the paper says otherwise. Think of it as a headnote that labels but does not decide.
In which person and tense should a precis be written?
A precis is written in the third person and, in most cases, the past tense, because you are reporting what the author said in indirect speech. First-person 'I' and 'we' become third-person references to the author, and reported clauses backshift ('is' to 'was', 'will' to 'would'). The one exception is a permanent or universal truth, which keeps its present tense even when reported.
Can I include my own opinion in a precis?
Never. The fidelity rule forbids adding any opinion, agreement, criticism or new fact. Words like 'rightly', 'unfortunately' or 'this excellent argument' betray your own voice and breach the rule. Your sole task is to restate the author's meaning faithfully. The discipline mirrors the courts' own separation of the reasoned core of a decision from incidental observation, as in State of U.P. v. Synthetics & Chemicals Ltd., (1991) 4 SCC 139, where a conclusion reached without reasoning was held to pass sub silentio and not to be the law declared.
What is the difference between a precis and a summary?
Every precis is a kind of summary, but a precis obeys strict additional rules that a loose summary need not: it is compressed to about one-third, written in your own words, kept to a single connected paragraph, faithful to the original order and tone, given a title, and accompanied by a declared word count. A question that asks you to 'summarise in your own words in about 100 words' is, in substance, asking for a precis and should be answered to precis standards.
Why does the judiciary examination test precis writing at all?
Because the skill is vocational. A judge must read voluminous pleadings and submissions and distil them into concise findings; a magistrate must reduce a sprawling chargesheet to a precise charge. The Supreme Court has repeatedly valued compression, laying down guidelines against delayed and unreadable judgments in Anil Rai v. State of Bihar, (2001) 7 SCC 318. A candidate who compresses accurately signals the very habit the bench wants in its officers, and because the precis needs no remembered citation, every mark on it is fully controllable.