Book Review

Objective

Write a review of a fictional or poetic work 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 2-3 brief passages from it that illustrate your points.

4. Complete a word-processed, correctly formatted draft of this paper for class on January 24th, 2023, for peer editing in class. Be ready to share it as a GoogleDoc with a classmate or two on that day.

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. Submit the completed final draft through Canvas by the end of the day on February 2nd, 2023.

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:

   Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. Knopf, Doubleday, 2004.

   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 or poem 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.

   4. Use the spelling checker on your word-processing application on the draft before the peer editing session and again before turning in the final draft.

   File Naming / Turning It in

   When sharing your working draft, name the file accordingly:

   [yourlastname]brwd

   in which "brwd" stands for "book review working draft".

   A student named Everett Adams would thus name the file "adamsbrwd.doc" before sharing the working draft. You will be sharing this GoogleDoc with your peer editor and also with me at jschwetm@d.umn.edu.

   After peer-editing, make a new copy of your draft, and keep working on that new copy. Clean out peer-editing comments and generally clean it up before submitting the final draft through Canvas. Name that final draft

   [yourlastname]brfd

   in which "brfd" stands for "book review final draft".