write book review thesis

Your review should have two goals: first, to inform the reader about the content of the book, and second, to provide an evaluation that gives your judgement of the book’s quality. Your introduction should include an overview of the book that both incorporates an encapsulated summary and a sense of your general judgment. This is the equivalent to a thesis statement. Do NOT spend more than one-third or so of the paper summarizing the book. The summary should consist of a discussion and highlights of the major arguments, features, trends, concepts, themes, ideas, and characteristics of the book. While you may use direct quotes from the book (make sure you always give the page number), such quotes should never be the bulk of the summary. Much of your grade will depend on how well you describe and explain the material IN YOUR OWN WORDS. You might want to take the major organizing themes of the book and use them to organize your own discussion. This does NOT mean, however, that I want a chapter-by-chapter summary. Your goal is a unified essay. So what do I want, if not just a summary? Throughout your summary, I want you to provide a critique of the book. (Hence the title: “A Critical Book Review.”) A critique consists of thoughts, responses, and reactions. It is not necessarily negative. Nor do you need to know as much about the subject as the author (because you hardly ever will). The skills you need are an ability to follow an argument and test a hypothesis. Regardless of how negative or positive your critique is, you need to be able to justify and support your position. Here are a number of questions that you can address as part of your critique. You need not answer them all, but questions one and two are essential to any book review, so those must be included. And these are ABSOLUTELY NOT to be answered one after another (seriatim). Don’t have one paragraph that.
Download a complete PDF version of this module. Download a complete Word version of this module. Contents What is a Book Review? An academic book review is a formal paper that works to describe, analyze, and evaluate a particular source as well as to provide detailed evidence to support this analysis and evaluation. Further, a review often explains how the book compares to other works on similar topics or illuminates the contribution the book makes to our understanding of a historical topic. top of page What is the Difference Between a Book Review and a Book Report? It is essential to distinguish between a university-level book review assignment and a book report assignment that you may have completed in high school. Book reports tend to focus on summarizing the work that you read; your goal is to explain what it says and show that you read the book with care.  In contrast, a book review asks you to analyze a book; your goal is to identify the key arguments of the book and how the author supports these arguments as well as to evaluate the book’s strengths and weaknesses. This evaluation of strengths and weaknesses is central to another key difference between book reviews and book reports. Book reports often ask you to provide a personal opinion as to whether or not you liked a book. A book review asks you to move beyond your personal likes or dislikes and provide a reasoned argument as to the merits or problems contained in the book. In a book review, it is not enough to say that a particular book was “bad” or “excellent.” You need to provide detailed analysis as to what factors, such as scope, theoretical perspective, or use of evidence made it so. top of page Preparing to Write a Book Review Reading Critically As with other essays, the steps toward writing an effective book review begin well before you turn on your computer and begin to type. Successful book.
What this handout is about This handout will help you write a book review, a report or essay that offers a critical perspective on a text. It offers a process and suggests some strategies for writing book reviews. What is a review? A review is a critical evaluation of a text, event, object, or phenomenon. Reviews can consider books, articles, entire genres or fields of literature, architecture, art, fashion, restaurants, policies, exhibitions, performances, and many other forms. This handout will focus on book reviews. For a similar assignment, see our handout on literature reviews. Above all, a review makes an argument. The most important element of a review is that it is a commentary, not merely a summary. It allows you to enter into dialogue and discussion with the work’s creator and with other audiences. You can offer agreement or disagreement and identify where you find the work exemplary or deficient in its knowledge, judgments, or organization. You should clearly state your opinion of the work in question, and that statement will probably resemble other types of academic writing, with a thesis statement, supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion. See our handout on argument. Typically, reviews are brief. In newspapers and academic journals, they rarely exceed 1000 words, although you may encounter lengthier assignments and extended commentaries. In either case, reviews need to be succinct. While they vary in tone, subject, and style, they share some common features: First, a review gives the reader a concise summary of the content. This includes a relevant description of the topic as well as its overall perspective, argument, or purpose. Second, and more importantly, a review offers a critical assessment of the content. This involves your reactions to the work under review: what strikes you as noteworthy, whether or not it was effective or persuasive, and.