were pieces called Rhetorical Precis. When we began talking about this type of writing, I noticed many confused faces around the classroom. Luckily, I was not one because I have been writing rhetorical precis since my junior year of high school. I have always found rhetorical precis to be a simple, easy, and affective way of summarizing book chapters, articles, or speeches. I love this form of summarizing because it is a simple, four sentenced paragraph. This format makes it easy to state the facts and not get off topic. In my opinion, the most important part of the rhetorical precis is the first sentence because it is the first thing the reader will read. Because it is the first thing the reader will read, one must put in a strong rhetorically active verb to draw the readers attention. For example, after reading an article about health care reform, I wrote the following opening sentence; “In this article the writer, Nick Laws, suggests that college students need to be in favor of the health care reform so they are not hit with excessive private health care expenses after college.” At the time, I felt that the rhetorically active verb phrase that would grab the attention of the reader the best would be “suggests that”. Now as I am reading over this, I see that I could have used a stronger, more attention grabbing phrase like “urges that”. In my opinion, this verb phrase is a little more “demanding of attention” and may have made my opening sentence a more interesting to read. One source for a rhetorical precis that I did not do in high school was an audio recording of a speech; this was our third and final rhetorical precis that we wrote in class. When I first got the assignment, I thought it was going to be much more difficult than any of the other ones I had ever done because I would be listening instead of reading. But when I actually did the assignment, I did not find it to me any more difficult than the rest. I decided to take notes while I was listening to the recording, and then referred back to them as I was writing the rhetorical precis. In the past, I have used rhetorical precis as an outline for papers; I find they really help with the structure and flow. I am very glad some of our first assignments were rhetorical precis; now I remember how much help they can really be.