Book review academic writing for graduate students

Book review academic writing for graduate students

AWG is one of the required texts for students in my graduate-level scientific writing course. Most of the students are multilingual and are pursuing a second degree. This book helps teach them the language choices necessary for formal, academic writing. It is useful, not hard to read, and full of practical exercises/5 attempt to connect the process to their graduate writing tasks. Thus, student peer review has the advantage of requiring little or no faculty time, but may be difficult to implement and may provide a lower caliber of feedback than does faculty review. Mechanics and Checklists Another approach that might help students improve How to Write a Graduate Level Book Review 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 judgment of the book’s quality. Your introduction should include an overview of the book that both incorporates an encapsulated

Best Book Review Examples for All Academic Levels

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. A review is a critical evaluation book review academic writing for graduate students 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. 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.

Typically, book review academic writing for graduate students, reviews are brief. In newspapers and academic journals, they rarely exceed 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:. Reviewing can be a daunting task. Someone has asked for your opinion about something that you may feel unqualified to evaluate.

The point is that someone—a professor, book review academic writing for graduate students, a journal editor, peers in a study group—wants to know what you think about a particular work. You may not be or feel like an expert, but you need to pretend to be one for your book review academic writing for graduate students audience. Tactfully voicing agreement and disagreement, praise and criticism, is a valuable, challenging skill, and like many forms of writing, reviews require you to provide concrete evidence for your assertions.

Consider the following brief book review written for a history course on medieval Europe by a student who is fascinated with beer:. Historically, ale and beer not milk, wine, or water were important elements of the English diet.

The student describes the subject of the book and provides an accurate summary of its contents. As a critical assessment, a book review should focus on opinions, not facts and details. Summary should be kept to a minimum, and specific details should serve to illustrate arguments. I wanted to know about the rituals surrounding drinking in medieval England: the songs, the games, the parties.

Bennett provided none of that information. I liked how the book showed ale and beer brewing as an economic activity, but the reader gets lost in the details of prices and wages. I was more interested in the private lives of the women brewsters. The reader has a sense of what the student expected of the book, but no sense of what the author herself set out to prove. Although the student gives several reasons for the negative review, those examples do not clearly relate to each other as part of an overall evaluation—in other words, in support of a specific thesis.

This review is indeed an assessment, but not a critical one. It combines balanced opinion and concrete example, a critical assessment based on an explicitly stated rationale, and a recommendation to a potential audience. Moreover, the student refers to an argument about feminist history in general that places the book in a specific genre and that reaches out to a general audience.

The example of analyzing wages illustrates an argument, the analysis engages significant intellectual debates, and the reasons for the overall positive review are plainly visible. The review offers criteria, opinions, and support with which the reader can agree or disagree.

Book review academic writing for graduate students is no definitive method to writing a review, although some critical thinking about the work at hand is necessary before you actually begin writing. Thus, book review academic writing for graduate students, writing a review is a two-step process: developing an argument about the work under consideration, and making that argument as you write an organized and well-supported draft.

See our handout on argument. What follows is a series of questions to focus your thinking as you dig into the work at hand. While the questions specifically consider book reviews, you can easily transpose them to an analysis of performances, exhibitions, and other review subjects. Once you have made your observations and assessments of the work under review, book review academic writing for graduate students, carefully survey your notes and attempt to unify your impressions into a statement that will describe the purpose or thesis of your review.

Check out our handout on thesis statements. Then, outline the arguments that support your thesis. Your arguments should develop the thesis in a logical manner. The relative emphasis depends on the nature of the review: if readers may be more interested in the work itself, you may want to make the work and the author more prominent; if you want the review to be about your perspective and opinions, then you may structure the review to privilege your observations over but never separate from those of the work under review.

What follows is just one of many ways to organize a review. Since most reviews are brief, many writers begin with a catchy quip or anecdote that succinctly delivers their argument. But you can introduce your review differently depending on the argument and audience. In general, you should include:. This should be brief, as analysis takes priority.

The necessary amount of summary also depends on your audience. Graduate students, beware! If, on the other hand, your audience has already read the book—such as a class assignment on the same work—you may have more liberty to explore more subtle points and to emphasize your own argument. See our handout on summary for more tips. Your analysis and evaluation should be organized into paragraphs that deal with single aspects of your argument.

This arrangement can be challenging when your purpose is to consider the book as a whole, but it can help you differentiate elements of your criticism and pair assertions with evidence more clearly. You do not necessarily need to work chronologically through the book as you discuss it. Given the argument you want to make, you can organize your paragraphs more usefully by themes, methods, or other elements of the book.

If you find it useful to include comparisons to other books, keep them brief so that the book under review remains in the spotlight. Avoid excessive quotation and give a specific page reference in parentheses when you do quote. Sum up or restate your thesis or make the final judgment regarding the book. You should not introduce new evidence for your argument in the conclusion. You can, however, book review academic writing for graduate students, introduce new ideas that go beyond the book if they extend the logic of your own thesis.

Did the body of your review have three negative paragraphs and one favorable one? What do they all add up book review academic writing for graduate students We consulted these works while writing this handout. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using.

For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial. We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Hoge, James. Literary Reviewing. Charlottesville: University Virginia of Press. Sova, Dawn, and Harry Teitelbaum. How to Write Book Reports4th ed. Walford, A. Reviews and Reviewing: A Guide. Phoenix: Oryx Press. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4. You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire book review academic writing for graduate students and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Literature Reviews: An Overview for Graduate Students

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How to Write Scholarly Book Reviews | Unwritten Histories

Book reviews are usually to 2, words in length. It is best to aim for about 1, words, as you can say a fair amount in 1, words without getting bogged down. There’s no point in making a book review into a page masterpiece since the time would have been better spent on an academic essay that would count for more on your c.v AWG is one of the required texts for students in my graduate-level scientific writing course. Most of the students are multilingual and are pursuing a second degree. This book helps teach them the language choices necessary for formal, academic writing. It is useful, not hard to read, and full of practical exercises/5 attempt to connect the process to their graduate writing tasks. Thus, student peer review has the advantage of requiring little or no faculty time, but may be difficult to implement and may provide a lower caliber of feedback than does faculty review. Mechanics and Checklists Another approach that might help students improve