Book Review

Objective

Write a review of a book you have read recently. Make an argument for reading it or for avoiding it. Base your argument on a presentation of key details in the chosen text.

Procedure

1. Choose a work of literature that somehow got your attention in the recent past either because it was so good, or because it was so bad. It can be a work you read for pleasure or one that you read for a class.

2. Write a review of the book in which you refer to the author, the title, the year of publication and provide a brief plot summary. The plot summary should take up no more than a few sentences of the review. Get past these factual details early in the review so that you can get to the most important part: an assessment of the chosen workÕs strengths and weaknesses. The audience of your book review consists of other students in this class, so write it with their sensibilities in mind. Most readers of the review will not have read the book.

3. Refer to specific details in the chosen to work to make you point about its worth. Quote brief passages from it that illustrate your points.

4. Print up and bring a word-processed, correctly formatted draft of this paper to class on January 23rd, 2018 for peer editing.

5. After considering feedback from peer editors and reconsidering your own argument, revise your book review.

6. Proofread your draft to identify and correct spelling and grammatical errors.

7. Turn in the completed final draft along with a peer-edited working draft in class on February 1st, 2018.

Writing Tips

1. MLA format means you should include a list of works cited at the end of your paper, even if it only includes one work. For example:

   McCarthy, Tom. Remainder. Vintage, 2007.

   See the course syllabus for additional models of works cited.

2. Some grammatical tips:

   1. Avoid using the passive voice whenever it is possible to do so. For example, replace "This book was written by Jane Austen" with "Jane Austen wrote this book."

   2. Italicization is the best way to signal that you are referring to a word itself and not to the thing that the word represents. You should also italicize titles of books (even in parenthetical references and lists of works cited) and foreign-language words like Bildungsroman or sine qua non.

   3. Refer to events in the book in the present tense. This a convention peculiar to literary analysis, and we obey it in class discussions as well as in written literary analyses.