You've started writing reviews, but they don't seem to have any direction. What's wrong? Let's take a look at audience and purpose.

Audience and Purpose | How? | Experiment #1 | Experiment #2 | Other Lessons

Audience and Purpose

Remember the first review that we looked at? Here’s a refresher:

“….Like Bauer's other heroines, Hope is a typical teenage girl who works hard, excels at her part-time job, and plans for her future. The adults around her, though mostly one-dimensional, together create a microcosm of society--the best and the worst of a teenager's support system. It's Bauer's humor that supplies, in Addie's cooking vernacular, the yeast that makes the story rise above the rest...Serve this up to teens--with a dash of hope.” *1

The phrases in bold illustrate that this review has a specific audience. The reviewer is making references to the author’s other books and assumes the reader is familiar with them. The reviewer’s final statement indicates that adults--teachers and librarians--are the intended audience for this review. The final sentence doesn’t insult teens, but it just wouldn’t be stated this way if a teen were writing this to another teen.

There are other subtle directions for the audience in a review. A book review by its very nature is intended to describe the book and persuade the reader. The book review has a purpose.

How?

How do we write a book review for an audience with purpose? Try one of the following experiments to get yourself thinking about purpose or audience. These experiments will not write the whole review for you, but they will move you toward your goal.

Experiment #1 – First Impressions …Looking at Purpose: Description

1. Set a timer for three minutes and get out a piece of paper.

2. In three minutes write down as quickly as possible all thoughts that come to mind about the characters and plot of your book. Facts, ideas, feelings, everything. Write in quick words and phrases, not complete sentences. Do not try to order your thoughts; do not worry if they are random.

3. When the timer has finished, look at your thoughts. Do you see details, moments, or certain people jumping out from your memory? First impressions are usually important moments that have really stuck with us.

4. Take several details or moments and write a fuller description of them without time constraints.

Experiment #2 – Sell it to me…Looking at Purpose: Persuasion

Fortunately, persuasion in book reviews is a bit simpler than say, convincing the city to place a garbage landfill further away than your backyard. Most people really don’t have that much stake in accepting or rejecting the argument of your book review—they’ll read the book or they won’t. They won’t smell the failure of their persuasion on a hot summer’s day wafting down the street.

1. Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the center and make a heading at the top of each column reading: PRO, CON.

2. In the column PRO, make a list of all of the positive attributes of the book. Include everything that comes to mind to you as positive: great book cover, short, has no adults in it, includes foul language. No one’s asking someone else what constitutes “good” right now—these are your ideas about what makes the book worth reading.

3. In the column CON, make a list of all of the negative attributes of the book. Include everything that comes to mind to you as negative: has talking animals, has foul language, takes place in the future, etc. Again, no one’s asking someone else what constitutes “bad” right now—these are your ideas about what makes the book a pass.

4. Look at your list of PROs and CONs—some of them literally jump off the page, don’t they? You must inform your readers of certain pros and cons. Pick these and incorporate them into complete sentences for your review. Write them in the form of statements, not opinion.

Other Lessons

*1 -- Frances Bradburn. Booklist. Copyright © American Library Association.

Created by N. Mellendorf, Librarian, Maine South High School, Library Resource Center, 2005. Updated, 2/4/08.