Ranking Three Précis and One Mislaid Letter Format
At a Ratnagiri junior college, 47 students sit a writing-skills test. The précis question gives a 220-word passage on rural water conservation and asks for 'a précis in about 70 words with a suitable title', marked out of 5: content 3, coherence and brevity 1, title 1. Student A writes 62 words, keeps three statistics and a village anecdote, and drops the passage's central causal claim - that neglect of traditional tanks, not low rainfall, explains the shortage. Student B writes 85 words, keeps that causal claim and two supporting points, and drops the statistics. Student C writes exactly 70 words but lifts two sentences verbatim from the passage. A fourth issue surfaces in the letter question: one student writes an application to the principal using the layout of a letter to a newspaper editor. The teacher must return marked scripts tomorrow and wants the marking consistent enough to survive a parent query.
1. Rank A, B and C on the précis and justify each mark against the stated split.
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B first, then A and C, but for opposite reasons. Content marks track the passage's main claim and the supports that carry it, not the most concrete details. B keeps the causal claim - the thing the rest of the passage exists to support - and two supports, so content 3; the 85-word length breaches the limit, and the brevity mark should be withheld or halved, giving 4/5 with the excess of 15 words noted as roughly twenty per cent over. A is inside the limit and orderly, but has kept the vivid material and discarded the argument, which is the classic précis failure; content 1, coherence and brevity 1, title 1 = 3/5. C has the right length and a real title, but two lifted sentences mean the defining requirement - compression in the writer's own words - is unmet; content capped at 2, coherence and brevity 0, title 1 = 3/5. A and C tie with different profiles, and the feedback should say so.
2. How should the mislaid letter format be marked and taught so that it is not merely a lost mark?
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Mark content first and format separately, then make the format teachable. The student has addressed the principal, so the audience is right and the content can be credited; the layout is wrong, and that is a small deduction, not a collapse. The teaching point is that format is a visible signal of whom you are writing to: an application carries a sender's block, date, receiver's designation, a subject line and a formal salutation and close, while a letter to a newspaper editor carries a shorter sender's block, no receiver designation, and a close inviting publication. A two-column comparison on the board, filled by the class from two model letters, fixes this faster than a list of rules. Then have each student redraft the same three sentences of content in both formats, so the difference is felt as a change of purpose rather than decoration. Format marks should be small but never zero-weight.
3. Devise a repeatable procedure that would stop students from missing the central claim of a passage.
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Teach a four-step routine and make students perform it visibly before writing. Step one: find the sentence that the other sentences exist to support - usually signalled by a contrast ('not X but Y') or a causal connector. Step two: strike out examples, statistics, anecdotes and names, since these illustrate the claim but do not constitute it. Step three: reduce the remaining claim to a single clause in the student's own words, then attach no more than two supports. Step four: count words, and if over budget, cut a support rather than the claim. Practise it on a short passage under time, then compare two students' versions on the board and ask which claim each has kept. The routine works because it gives a decision order: claim first, supports second, illustration last. Students who reverse that order produce précis like A's, however neat the prose.