Academic Forms: The Précis, the Abstract and the Literature Review

Three forms you will meet in your first university term

Open almost any first-year course outline and you will find instructions like these: Submit a one-paragraph précis of the assigned article. Begin your research paper with a 200-word abstract. Your proposal must include a brief literature review.

These are academic forms: short, precise kinds of writing with conventions that professors expect you to know. Expectation 2.1 asks you to write for different purposes and audiences using a variety of informational, literary and graphic forms. At Grade 12, that includes the forms scholars use with each other. Each one also strengthens your ISU: a précis checks that you understand a critic, an abstract checks that you know your own argument, and a literature review shows where your argument fits.

The précis

A précis (pronounced pray-SEE; the word comes from French for precise) is a summary that keeps the original's main ideas, order, emphasis and tone, in your own words, at a fraction of the length. It includes no opinions of yours.

The most useful version for university is the rhetorical précis: exactly four sentences, each with a job.

1. Who and what: the author (with a credential if useful), the genre, the title, the date in brackets, a rhetorically accurate verb (argues, asserts, suggests, questions), and a that clause stating the thesis.
2. How: how the author develops or supports the thesis, usually in the order they do it (by first... then...).
3. Why: the author's purpose, with an in order to phrase.
4. For whom: the intended audience, and the relationship or tone the author sets with them.

Model (about an invented article): Literary critic Rita Okafor, in her article "Survival Is Not Enough" (2021), argues that Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven presents art as something that survives only through performance. Okafor supports this claim by tracing the Traveling Symphony's staging of Shakespeare and comparing it with the novel's handmade comic book. Her purpose is to shift critical attention from the novel's pandemic plot to its theory of culture, in order to show that the book is as much about art as about collapse. She writes for scholars of contemporary fiction, adopting a confident, conversational tone that invites them to reread a familiar novel.

The abstract

An abstract is a summary of your own finished paper, placed before it. Researchers decide from the abstract alone whether to read on, so it must stand on its own.

An informative abstract (the usual kind for a research essay) answers five questions in about 150 to 250 words, in one paragraph:

1. Topic and question: what does the paper investigate?
2. Context or gap: why does it need investigating?
3. Approach: which texts, which lens or method?
4. Argument or findings: what does the paper conclude? (This is what a descriptive abstract leaves out, and why it is weaker.)
5. Significance: why does it matter?

Conventions: write it last; no quotations or citations in most cases; define abbreviations; use the present tense for your argument (This essay argues) and the past for what you did (I compared), if your teacher allows the first person. Many journals add a line of keywords.

Model (for Priya's ISU): Critics have read Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven and Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves mainly as novels of survival, focusing on how characters endure catastrophe. Less attention has been paid to the stories the characters tell one another. This essay compares how the two novels present storytelling after catastrophe, drawing on postcolonial criticism, on Indigenous critics' readings of Dimaline's work and on published interviews with both authors. It argues that both novels make storytelling necessary to community, but in different ways: Station Eleven preserves stories as art rescued from a lost civilization and kept alive through performance, while The Marrow Thieves presents them as living knowledge tied to land, language and Indigenous continuity, passed from Elders to the young. The comparison shows that what a story is for depends on who has had their stories taken. It also raises a question for readers of post-apocalyptic fiction: for some communities, has the catastrophe these novels imagine already happened? Keywords: storytelling, post-apocalyptic fiction, Indigenous literature, Canadian fiction, community. (158 words, not counting the keywords)

The literature review

A literature review summarizes, connects and evaluates what has been published on a topic, then shows where your own work fits. In a Grade 12 ISU it may be one or two paragraphs near the start, sometimes headed Critical Context. In university, it may be a whole paper.

The most common mistake is the laundry list: one paragraph per source, each beginning Another critic.... A real literature review is organized by idea:

1. Build a synthesis matrix. Put sources in rows and ideas in columns, and note each source's key claim in the right cell.
2. Read down each column. Where do critics agree? Where do they disagree? Which columns are empty? An empty cell for an important idea is often your gap.
3. Write by theme. Each paragraph is about one idea, with several sources in it: Critics broadly agree that... (Lee; Grey). They divide, however, over...
4. Evaluate as you go. Note which arguments are better supported, or limited (one novel only, an older reading).
5. End with the gap and your question. No critic has yet compared the two novels' treatment of storytelling. This essay asks...

Use synthesis signals: similarly, likewise, in contrast, building on, whereas, a different line of criticism.