Your Guide To Reviewing Literature

rom famed movie critic Roger Ebert, who wields influence over hundreds of thousands of moviegoers every day, to a student reviewer in a school newspaper, the dissertation review holds an important place in our culture. The earliest reviews were of books and plays, and this guide will show how to write quality reviews about those two forms of media, but the skills you will learn here can be applied anywhere, from music to video games.

At first glance, reviewing looks easy: hey, I get to tell people what I think, and they have to listen! This is great! Beware, however, because good reviewing includes much more than your opinion. You must back up your feelings with support if you want to influence anyone. Try to explain why you felt a certain way, what it was about the literature that moved you to enjoy it or not, instead of just telling the reader what you thought.

The literature review can follow virtually any format. Some are structured like a relaxed stroll in the park: they meander through the book from start to finish, writing about whatever strikes their fancy, a well-defined character here or a bad plot device here: in this type of review, you simply tell the reader what you saw as you went through the book.

Other reviews are like a guided tour of a city. They have a strict itinerary, with setting over here, characters over here and so on. These reviews tend to be nonlinear, jumping back and forth around the book to illustrate a point.

Each of these approaches has its advantages and disadvantages, and there is lots of middle ground between them. Choose one and stick with it.

Lots of reviewers like to recap some of the plot to give the reader some context, but you don't want to give away major plot points, since you don't want to ruin the story for your reader. If a certain scene illustrates something important about the book, sketch it in detail.

What can you write about in a review? Virtually anything: you can right about a book's plot, its narrative structure, its cohesion, its style, its tone, its characters, its pacing, its setting, the author's storytelling, or whatever else comes to mind. Your job is to help the reader decide whether or not to read the book, and so you can draw on any aspect of the work that helps you to do that. You never know what will strike the reader and make him or her say, oh, I get it. As long as you are connecting with your readers and helping them to make sense of the book, you are good to go.

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