How to Write a Review

Understand the purpose of the review. Reviews are assigned so that you can think carefully about how you feel or think about the work after you finish reading it. ^[1] When writing a review, you need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the work, whether the work has achieved its goals, and how well it has done. Speech is more than just an opinion piece. ^[2] To write a review, you need to read the work carefully to understand its hidden meaning. You must state your feelings about the implications, further clarify, evaluate and analyze the author’s goals and main points of view. In many cases, you can use the first person pronoun “I” when writing your review. ^[3]

• In your review, you need to connect ideas, paragraphs, and overarching concepts and use evidence from the work itself to support your points. If asked to agree or disagree with the author’s point of view, you need convincing evidence as to why you feel that way. ^[4]
• If you need to write reviews about multiple works, you need to analyze how they relate to each other. If you’re writing a review for a piece of work, perhaps you should relate it to the overarching concepts and topics discussed in class.
• You may be assigned to write reviews for movies, speeches, field trips, lab hours, or even class discussions. ^[5]
• Reviews are not a summary of a work. It’s also not saying “I like this book because it’s interesting” or “I hate it because it’s boring”. ^[6]

Determine the requirements of the assignment. Before you start writing, you must determine exactly what the teacher is asking of you. Some teachers will want you to analyze or evaluate the work. Others want a personal review. Make sure you know the type of review you need to write.

• If you are unsure, you can ask your teacher to clarify what they expect from your work.
• You may be asked to write a review of this work in connection with other works. In that case, you should use quotes from both works for your article.
• You may be asked to write a review of a piece of work in relation to the topics discussed in class. For example, in the case of reading a book in the Sociology of Gender Roles, you should read, take notes, and write comments based on how gender roles are presented in this book.
• You may be asked to express your personal feelings about a piece of work. Though less common, sometimes teachers just want to know if you’ve read the work and what you think about it. In this case, you should focus on your view of the work.

Read the work as soon as it is assigned. Writing a review isn’t just about reading, commenting, and submitting. Reviews need to synthesize pieces of text, which means you have to take the information you have read and link them together so that you can analyze and evaluate. You need to take the time to read and, more importantly, to absorb what you’ve just read in order to put ideas together. ^[7]

• One of the biggest mistakes students often make is waiting until the last minute to read and write: feeling is deeply contemplative after reading it over and over again.
• You should reread the work a few times. For the first time, read and familiarize yourself with the work. Next time, start thinking about your proposition and how you feel.

Write down your initial impressions. After your first reading, write down your first impressions of the work. Do the same for every subsequent reading.

• Try to complete some of the following sentences after reading: I think…, I see that…, I feel…, It seems… , or In my opinion… ^[8]

Take notes while reading. As you reread the work, take notes. Taking notes in the margins allows you to easily find the citation, plot, character development, or feel for the work. If you don’t take careful notes, you’ll have a much harder time writing a cohesive review.

Ask questions while reading. As you read, you must begin to question the work. This is the starting point of your assessment and feelings. Some questions to consider include:

• What is the author referring to?
• What is the author’s main argument?
• What arguments and assumptions does the author make and how have they been supported?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the piece? Where is the problem related to this topic?
• How are the works linked together? (If writing reviews about many works)
• How do these ideas connect to the overall idea of the class/unit/etc? ^[9]