Economic Book Review
(I)Form of the Review
Your review should be about 7-12 pages long, double-spaced, with reasonable margins. The 7-12 pages is a guideline, not an absolute length requirement. In other words, I will not automatically grade you down for having less than 7 or more than 12 pages. In my experience, however, usually if a paper is less than 7 pages it doesn’t do an adequate job; this is not always the case– some people have very condensed styles of writing and I have had good papers that were 5 or 6 pages long. At the other end of the length guideline: I’ve had good papers that were 15 or 18 or even 20 pages long, but usually when a paper goes above about 12 pages it’s because the writer isn’t able to distinguish what was important in the book from what was less important, and that detracts from the quality of the paper.
I don’t require students to use any style manual or special form for their papers. You also don’t generally need to footnote anything because the content comes out of one book and is not a research paper. One exception to this: if you refer to any source other than the book you read (which I don’t expect you to do, but which you can do if you wish), then you should footnote that external source. If you take any statement word for word from the book, you should put it in quotation marks.
I do not generally grade on neatness or proper grammar, usage, and spelling. I’m interested in the content of the paper. However, there is a limit to this. If a paper is extraordinarily bad in neatness, grammar, or spelling, then it crosses a threshold where it’s just “unprofessional”– and then I will reduce its grade. (Usually in a class of 25 this may happen on 1 or 2 papers).
(II) Substance/Content of the Review
Most of your review should be what one might call an “analytical summary” of the book. You should recount what the book says, its theme, its main arguments, how the author illustrates his points. You should analyze the main points made by the book. Some of the books on the list are quite analytical, even fairly theoretical; others are basically narratives. Thus, the content of your review will differ somewhat depending on what kind of a book you’re doing. It’s possible for a reader of a review to tell a lot from how the writer of the review summarizes the book: I can usually tell how well you understood the book by the way you analyze and summarize it.
For most of these books it probably would enhance your review (though it’s not a requirement) to include at least a small evaluative portion in your review. By “small” I mean perhaps 1-2 pages in a 10 page review. By “evaluative portion” I mean a statement of what you thought about the book– what the book did well/its strengths; what it didn’t do well/its weaknesses. Your evaluation can be wholly positive, wholly negative, or anywhere in between. Feel free to disagree with what your professor may think about the topic (on some of these books/topics I have an opinion, on others I don’t). All I ask in your evaluation is that you think before you write: if you agree or disagree with something in the book, state a cogent reason for why you do. A mere emotional reaction– pro or con– to a book’s contents without thinking about it is usually not so good in a review.
For some of the books, it may be possible to make interesting connections in your review with topics that arose in class. If so, that’s fine; it won’t be possible for all books, though.
One slight dilemma for the professor in grading the reviews is that the difficulty level of the books on the list covers a wide range, from pretty easy to rather hard. I have to balance two somewhat conflicting considerations in my grading: First, if a book is on the list it should be possible for a student to write a good enough review of it so that he/she gets an “A” on the review– this should be so even if the book is easy, otherwise it would not be fair to put the book on the list. On the other hand, the level of difficulty of the book does enter indirectly into grading in the following sense: if the book is one of the most difficult books on the list, I don’t expect the student to be able to understand it as completely or thoroughly as if the book is an easy one. A student may misunderstand part of one of the more difficult books and still get a very good grade, because what he was able to understand, given the book’s difficulty, is relatively impressive. On the other hand, with one of the easiest books on the list, I’d have less grading tolerance for significant misunderstandings of what the book is saying.
I hope you view this assignment in a positive manner. Many, perhaps most, students end up liking the books they read (because of the variety of choice the list gives you). The assignment is in part designed to give you some assignments worth a significant chunk of your grade in which your performance is a little more “under your control” than on an exam. Anyone can have a bad day on an exam, or not have time to study properly for it. For the paper, though, there should be a more reliable correlation between the amount of effort you put in on it and the grade you’re able to get. The Book Reviews, as I’ve mentioned in class, are also graded around a higher median than exams are (a “B” median, as opposed to a “C+” median), so the book reviews are often a way for a student to raise/rescue his grade in the course.
The most common way to “blow” this assignment is probably simply by putting off doing it too long. You should try to finish a first copy of your review a week or so before the review is due. Then you can let it sit a couple of days, come back to it “fresh”, make revisions and corrections, and get it in by the due date. Papers written in first and final draft at the deadline, and thus in haste, usually show it and don’t do as well. (I speak as a total hypocrite on this point, having been one of the Great Procrastinators during my student days, but I’m trying to save you from the same error!).
If you have questions about writing your papers feel free to ask me about them. Also, students sometimes have things they don’t quite understand about the contents of a book, which I might be able to help them understand if they ask me. Usually a few students will ask me to look at first drafts of their papers. Since this is not a Writing-enhanced course I’m not really able to critique in detail first drafts of students who are in the process of writing their papers. However, if you want me to (and if I don’t get too many people asking me to do this, which I probably won’t), I would read through your first draft and give you a brief oral summary of my impressions of it if you turn in the draft to me at least a week before the paper’s due date.
The first review is due Friday, March 2, at Midnight. If you can’t get it in on time, you can turn it in as late as Friday, March 9 at Midnight with a full letter grade lateness penalty. 9 times out of 10 a full letter grade penalty is severe enough to make it wise for a student to get his paper in on time. It is possible, however, in rare cases, for a student to be better off by turning a review in late. For example, let’s say you procrastinate terribly and end up dashing off a paper between 10 P .M. and Midnight on the due date without being able to put any real thought or care into the paper. Such a paper might well end up getting a “D”. In that case, it could actually be better to forget about it, go for the penalty date, take the extra days, turn in a decent paper—say a “B” paper, which would be reduced to a “C” with the lateness penalty– and still be better off. Bottom line: the best thing to do by far is to start early and get your paper in on time. However, failing that, it can at least occasionally be tactically wise to turn it in late and take the penalty.
