One of the most popular tasks today in high schools is review paper writing. Why is it so? The core reason is that we are living in the epoch of constant sharing of information. When you are willing to pick out a movie to watch, a device to buy, or a book to read, you usually read reviews. A lot of people nowadays write reviews, but unfortunately we can’t consider all of them just, consistent, and reasonable. In this article, we are going to provide you with guidelines on how to elaborate an even-handed review of the book. Follow easy steps to finish your paper!
Step 1: Contemplate the Plan
Completing a plan is almost half the work. Think of general points you are going to reveal. Keep in mind the approximate amount of pages you were assigned to write. According to this factor, you should decide how many items you will discuss. After writing the core items, think of specific details to each point of the outline if such details appear in your mind. If not, there’s no need to think of them at this stage. Below, you’ll see our basic plan which will help you to create your own outline for a review paper.
1. Introduction: a short introduction of the author and his or her work (country, year of publication, etc.)
2. Personal feelings about the work.
3. Objective analysis of the book from different sides.
4. Comparison to other works of the same genre.
5. Conclusion and recommendation on whether this literary work is worth being acquainted to.
This outline is very general and your task is to make it more specific and relevant to your review paper. If you need to write a short review, it’s better to complete a one-level outline. If the text is going to be relatively long, add several subpoints to each general point.
Step 2: Write About Your Opinion
At this step, you won’t need to look for evidence. Your task is just to give your opinion on a certain literary work as if you were talking to a friend. Your tone and word choice doesn’t matter. You will rewrite this section soon. You just need it to compare the opinion which the readers get at first sight and the opinion after further investigation. Here, you can talk about feelings about the turns of the plot, the characters, the descriptions, actually about everything concerning the book. If you decide to add this part to your review of the book, make sure it doesn’t contradict your further inferences.
Step 3: Reread the Book
As a rule, when people get acquainted with the book for the first time, they don’t pay much attention to details. Therefore, you presumably will need to conduct more painstaking investigation of the work. While rereading, we recommend that you make the table according the following scheme:
- the first column is dedicated to the name of the outline item;
- the second contains your opinion about the thing which drew your attention;
- the third should consist of the evidence, such as the quote or the page number where you can find a certain piece of text you refer to.
Step 4: Answer to the Questions:
When analyzing the book, we suggest you to answer the following questions:
1. How does the author start the story — gradually or sharply? What feelings does such a beginning call from you?
2. Are all the main characters developed by the end of the novel? If not, why do you think the author wrote it this way?
3. What is the writing style of the author? Does it remind you of someone else or is it totally unique?
4. What literary tools are recurring throughout the text?
5. If you compare this book to other books of the same genre, what place do you think it takes?
6. Is the plot compelling? If yes, what exactly makes it so?
7. What topics are raised in the book? Do they correspond to the problems of the times when the work was created?
8. Which audience is this literary work oriented to? What made you to conclude this?
9. Is it easy or hard to read? Can you call the book a “page-turner”?
10. Would you recommend reading the book?
11. Compare this work to other works of this author. Is it better, worse, or the same?
Step 5: Complete a Coherent Text
After answering all the questions and filling the table, you still need to write a coherent text which will actually be your review of the book. We didn’t give you a strict scheme that you should follow on purpose because review writing doesn’t imply a sharply defined structure. You can present your thoughts in the way you like.
The only thing that matters is that your review won’t look like a set of thesis statements. You need to make transitions between different parts of the text. Also, you should present information in the logical order. At the end, your last task is to check grammatical, spelling, and punctuation mistakes.
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