Bokrecension i engelska

Choose a book written in English, a novel, a biography, a book of facts or something suitable. Read it and write a review in English.

Your assignment is to read a book in English and write a review in English. Choose

a novel, a biography, a book of facts or some other kind of book which you find interesting. Pick a book which seems interesting and fun, but at a level which you think you can cope with (manage). Ask for help if you find it difficult to choose a book.

 

Read the book and write a review. Feel free to use the leaflet ”Hjälpreda vid recensionsskrivning” when you write. It contains suggestions to what you can write about. You can use one or many of the suggestions but you don’t have to use it.

 

When writing a review, which is an evaluation (assessment) of the book, you are supposed already in the introduction to comment what you think is the most important, best, worst, strangest or most conspicuous (iögonfallande) thing or something similar. You can also make a comparison between two books which have some kind of connection like for example ”Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe and ”Lord of the flies” by William Golding. The reader wants a quick judgement of the book to see if it is of any interest to read.

 

In the introduction you are also supposed to hook the reader. You are expected to try to entice (lure) the reader to read your whole review. That you can do by giving the reader a taste of what you are going to write about (remember the introduction to the film ”Indiana Jones”, ”Raiders of the lost arc” that we saw). Another way to hook the reader is for example to write (from the film ”E.T. that we also saw) that ”Most people think that E.T. is about a boy who meets an alien, but I have a completely different idea about what it deals with”. Hopefully the reader will be thrilled to hear what you think about it.

 

After the introduction you can start mentioning and commenting the plot, the characters, the language, the structure, the perspective and so on. You could also comment the actual reading process, that is what it was like to read the book.

 

Try to comment a lot. It is very good to be personal and tell what you think and feel when you read. Avoid summarizing (retelling the story) too much. Also try to mix summary and commentary instead of writing a long summary with just a short commentary at the end of your review.

 

In the body text (the running text between introduction and conclusion) you may use the title of the book a few times. It could function as a simple theme (röd tråd). As a theme you normally use what you mention and comment on in the introduction. The thing that you find most important, best, worst, strangest or most conspicuous. The theme should therefore be mentioned several times in the body text to make the review stick together, to make it feel like an entity.

 

The theme is of course also supposed to be part of the conclusion. There it is expected to be the most important thing in the conclusion of what you think of the book. In the conclusion it is a great benefit if a kind of twist is included. The twist could be that the theme is connected to something in real life which everyone can relate to, or to something personal which the reader might find interesting.

 

If you think it is too difficult to write a review you can just write a summary which is enough to be able to reach the grade E. But remember that a summary is supposed to be written in the present tense. Try to divide the text into paragraphs (shorter passages with maybe four to six sentences) and skip a line between every paragraph. This is expected of you whether you write the review on a computer or by hand.

 

Good luck with your reading and writing.

Mats Sundin