Précis compression versus essay polish in the last two weeks
You are planning the last two weeks before the board examination for a batch of 38. A candidate, Hetal, has submitted a précis and an essay. The précis passage is 230 words and the rubric allows one-third, so about 77 words; she has written 112. She has kept both of the passage's examples, kept a six-word quotation intact, and dropped the closing generalisation, which was the only sentence stating the writer's point. Her essay on the same topic scored 9/15; the examiner's note reads 'flow good, examples vague' and flags five misspelled tatsama words. She has six Gujarati periods left with you, and two other subjects are competing for her time. The paper weights the essay at 15 marks and the précis at 5.
1. Mark the précis out of 5 using content (2), compression (1), language (1), own words (1), and decide whether keeping the six-word quotation breaches the 'own words' requirement.
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Awarded: content 1, compression 0, language 1, own words 0 - total 2/5.
Content 1/2: she keeps supporting material but drops the generalisation, which is the writer's argument. A précis that loses the point and keeps the examples is inverted: the examples exist to serve that sentence.
Compression 0/1: 112 words against a ceiling of about 77 is 45 percent over. The ceiling is part of the task, not a suggestion, so no mark.
Language 1/1: the sentences are controlled and readable.
Own words 0/1: a six-word verbatim clause is a quotation, not a paraphrase. A short technical term may be retained because it has no equivalent, but a full quoted clause is exactly what the criterion excludes. Her transferable fix is to convert it to reported content in three words.
Judgement note: if a candidate were two or three words over the limit with the generalisation intact, award compression - a mechanical word-count veto would punish the better précis.
2. Rank the three fixes - précis compression, essay examples, tatsama spelling - for the six remaining periods, and justify the ranking in marks per period and transfer.
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1. Précis compression (two periods). She is currently losing 3 of 5 marks here and the cause is procedural, not knowledge: she does not know what to delete. Two periods of guided deletion should recover most of it, and the same skill - locating the topic sentence and discarding illustration - transfers directly to comprehension answers and to essay paragraphing.
2. Tatsama spelling (20 minutes as homework, checked in class). Five misspelled words is a closed list. It is cheap and certain, but low-yield, so it must not consume a period; set it as a list to memorise and test it in the first five minutes of a lesson you are already running.
3. Essay examples (start now, do not expect a finish). The 15-mark weight is the largest single prize, but 'vague examples' comes from having no example bank, which is built over weeks. Give her a one-page template - claim, example with a name or number, link - and ask for two prepared examples she can adapt, not five.
3. Give Hetal a numbered procedure with a word budget that reaches about 77 words while keeping the generalisation.
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Procedure:
- Read the passage twice without writing; underline only the sentence that states the writer's point.
- Write one clause per paragraph in the margin - no examples, no figures.
- Put the writer's point as the last clause of your précis, whatever its position in the passage.
- Draft, then count; the budget is 5 paragraphs × 15 words, plus 2 words of slack.
- Cut in this order: examples first, then the quotation, then adjectives and adverbs. Never cut the generalisation.
Applied to her draft: the two examples are costing roughly 25 words and the quotation 6. Replacing both with one category phrase ('for instance, in the case of ...') frees about 27 words, which takes 112 to about 85; tightening two long clauses brings it to 77 while the restored generalisation adds 10 and remains inside the ceiling.
Check: the last sentence of the précis read aloud on its own should still tell a listener what the writer was arguing.