Choose either Gary Snyder's "Etiquette of Freedom" (LATE, 14-16) or Henry David Thoreau's "Solitude" (LATE, pp. 48-52) as the focus of your précis. Following the principles articulated on the "Summaries" page, work to condense your article to no more than a third of its original length. Your purpose here is to extract the thesis and the bare bones of the argument. We will work on this in class, using the Gelernter handout.
Please turn your final drafts in to me (at: ). Send your précis in an e-mail message (i.e., cut-and-paste the document's contents into the e-mail message box). If your e-mail program does not allow formatting, you should indicate titles of books and other items that you would normally italicize/underscore by placing underscoring on either side of the target, e. g., _Paradise Lost_. Since "text only" formatting does not display the usual paragraphing structures (5-space-indented first lines, for example), please indicate paragraph breaks by inserting two returns.
Please be sure to title the file with your last name and "precis": e.g., "smith.precis." If everyone labels their essays as "precis" without including your name to differentiate them, dire consequences are possible (i.e., each subsequent mailing with the name "precis" will overwrite its predecessor).
I will evaluate your précis for grammar, mechanics, style, as well as for the quality of your summary.