Book Review Essay
A book review essay is a kind of academic paper that gives a short book description as well as provides the opinion of the author. This type of paper can be informal and formal. However, as book review writing is similar to other college assignments, it should definitely be written using formal language.
Main Points to Take into Consideration
- As a rule, you should use present tense to write book reviews. However, in case you want to write your paper in the past tense, you have to make sure that you are consistent in the use of tenses in your essay. You should use the past perfect tense when you describe the events that happened in the book. But when you present your impressions about the described book, the past simple tense should be used.
- You have to properly structure your paper while writing a book review. You should begin it with a short summary of the plot of the book. It should be one or two paragraphs long. After that, you have to provide general comments about you chosen book. Make sure that you do not tell the whole story to your readers since they should be interested in reading this book after checking your book review.
- While creating your book review essay, you should examine the text of your described book. You have to analyze the language that is used in the book and provide some examples of the usage of stylistic tools. Remember that you should not only analyze your book, but also provide an assessment of book characteristics.
- One more important thing that you should do is to conduct thorough research about the author of the book, his or her other literary works, the inspiration for creating this very book, the story behind its creation, and so on.
Mistakes that Are Commonly Made
- Merely providing opinions. The main aim of a well-written book review paper is to be objective as well as supported by reasoning.
- Using slang and informal language. You have to consider that while writing book reviews, you have to use formal and academic language.
- Not identifying the basic info about your book. Do not forget that you should include the author of your book, the date of publication, place of publication, the publisher, and its edition.
- Forgetting about the audience. Every author targets a certain audience while creating their books. Of course, you may consider the book as unrealistic and boring, but you have to take into account the audience for which the author created it. Therefore, you should analyze the preferences of this audience
- Reading only some chapters of the book or its summary. You should know that if you want to create a professionally written book review paper, you have to read the whole book, not just the summary of it.
- Providing long direct quotes from your book. It is not a good idea as every professor has his own rules for acceptable percentage of direct quotes in the paper. Moreover, if you read the whole book, it will not be a problem for you to summarize it.
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