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You are asked to prepare a critical book review, which must be no more than 1500 words in length.

Book Review Guidelines

For your coursework, you are asked to prepare a critical book review, which must be no more than 1500 words in length.

 

Why a book review?

            Throughout the course of your degree you will be asked to write many essays for coursework assignments and exams and more often than not you will gather all the relevant information from textbooks and journal articles. Although textbooks and articles are excellent sources of factual information, they are written in a style and format that does not easily translate into writing excellent essays. During the course of this assignment you will notice that the book you are reviewing reads differently than a standard textbook or journal article. What you may not immediately realise is that the difference lies in the fact that the book you are reviewing constitutes an expression of a personal opinion by the author(s). This opinion is formulated on the basis of facts, but – and this is crucial – the authors do not simply provide you with a summary of the facts – they develop arguments from them, and exactly the same difference distinguishes average or good essays from those that are excellent. Specifically, average or good essays tend to be ones that simply summarise facts whereas excellent ones tend to use facts to express an opinion (e.g., about an essay question). So one of the main reasons for asking you to write a book review is to provide you with an opportunity to reflect on the kind of writing style that you should try to adopt when writing essays and to get some practice in summarizing a large volume of text succinctly without leaving out critical details.

 

How to write a book review

            The key to a good book review is that it must provide a clear and concise summary of the main arguments presented in the book. To achieve this, it is important that you write your review for an audience that would never have heard of the book before. An ideal mindset to adopt in this context is to imagine that you are writing the book review for next year’s cohort of students to help them decide which book they might want to choose to review. Or you could think about what kind of review you might find useful for deciding which book to choose to review. By adopting this mindset instead of writing the review for your marker (who will know the book inside out), you will make sure to explain key concepts and arguments in a way that does not assume any prior knowledge in your audience – and this is a key ingredient for a good book review.

To give an example, imagine that I provide you with a review of a book about autism in which I mention that ‘The author explains that the clinically defining social-communication impairments of autism are probably due to Theory of Mind difficulties’. To make this review as useful and accessible to you as possible, I would need to make sure to explain what ‘Theory of Mind’ is and ideally also give an example of the evidence the author uses to support the claim that Theory of Mind difficulties contribute to the clinically defining features of autism. Thus I could write something like... ‘The author explains that the clinically defining social-communication impairments of autism are probably due to Theory of Mind difficulties, which are difficulties in understanding other people’s behaviours in terms of the feelings, desires and thoughts that motivate them. In support of this argument, the author describes a number of experiments which show that autistic children have difficulties understanding that other children may hold different beliefs from their own, as well as experiments demonstrating that they often have difficulties recognizing the emotional expressions of other children’. Regardless of how much or how little you know about autism, this short summary would give you a reasonably good idea about some of the arguments that are presented in the book I’m reviewing. So when you write your book review (and in fact any other piece of coursework), always ask yourself whether you are explaining everything clearly enough so that next years’ students would find it easy to understand.

Another important feature of good book reviews is a clear structure. Most people find it helpful to draft a very rough outline of what they want to write before they commit to it. This can be done by simply listing a few phrases or bullet points that set out the order of the key arguments and points that are to be presented. For your book review it might be a good idea to start with a list of the titles of the different chapters or sections in the book you are reviewing and adding some sub-points to provide a roadmap of the main points you’ll want to summarise. Once you have your outline, you can start tackling each point to build up your review. As you do so it will be important that you use paragraphs effectively to structure the different points. As you read through the book that you are reviewing, make a conscious effort to notice where the author breaks for a new paragraph, subheading or chapter. You will notice that paragraph breaks almost always happen at the end of a complete thought, argument, or point or they are used to structure the different points that make up a broader argument. You will very rarely see paragraphs that are less than 3 sentences long or bulks of text that are hardly interrupted with paragraph breaks.

In addition to using paragraph breaks effectively, also make sure to have a clear introduction and conclusion to your book review. The first introductory paragraph should provide a clear and captivating summary of what the key questions or issues are that the book seeks to address. Returning to my example above, I might start a review of a book about autism by saying something like…’Autism is one of the most common childhood developmental disorders that affects around 1% of the population. Despite half a century of research, however, the causes of this disorder remain a mystery. Jo Bloggs aims to shed some new light on this mystery in his 2018 book called [TITLE OF BOOK], by pulling together evidence from the psychological, neurobiological and genetic literature. The main question he seeks to answer is whether …[QUESTION].’ Once you have captivated the interest of the audience, you can then provide the summary of the main arguments in the book before ending your review with a concluding paragraph that should capture the take-home message of the author as well as your own impressions of the boo


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