Book Report
Tips for when you’re sandbagged into writing a book report?
Seems like too many times during our schooling most of us have been strong armed into writing a book report. We have to live with book report assignments during our academic life, grade school, high school and college.
Book reports in grade school are easier than when you’re in high school or college. The writing is simple and most of the times the teacher gives you a break due to the age of the students.
High school book reports are a whole different ball game altogether. It gets tougher? The teacher expects you to know what you’re doing and the assignments can get large and unmanageable. This is the time when we’re expected to know how to write a book report precisely without those irritating grammatical errors and have neophyte mistakes.
Nobody likes being told to “see me after class” from teachers but still every one of us has had to face them one time or the other during high school.
College, again, presents new challenges when we find that the concept of book reports hasn’t gone away but haunts us under a different name altogether. Suddenly book reports are characterized as essays and instead of broad stories the task they become more focused on an idea that is a recurrent element in the book and specific themes. Instead of pandering in wishful thinking and hoping we were still in high school where things were a lot easier, it’s the time when we’re required to reveal our talent if we have any to reveal.
If we really accept the task to doing it seriously, learning how to write book reports is pretty elementary. It’s simply a matter of organizing and doing it in the right order instead of going at it in a haphazard manner. The best way to write a book report is to work on it one step at a time. Don’t try to make notes in-between, first step read the entire book. Writing notes in between can cause you to loose focus of the underlying ideas the author is trying to convey.
Your next step is to decide on the focus of your essay as per the guidelines of the assignment. Is the assignment for a general summary or a focus on a particular aspect of the book, prepare a general outline and structure of the essay.
After you have your outline and the structure is ready all that is needed now is to focus on the book’s major theme and begin to pour your heart out on what you feel the book and the theme is all about. After all, an essay is all about enlarging the smaller issues.
If you are truly a greenhorn in writing book reports or essays and want to improve your technique there are many good websites available to assist you in your task, thanks to Google.
