Your Guide to Reviewing Literature

From famed movie critic Roger Ebert, who wields influence over hundreds of thousands of moviegoers every day, to a student reviewer in a school newspaper, the review holds an important place in our culture. The earliest reviews were of books and plays, and this guide will show how to write quality reviews about those two forms of media, but the skills you will learn here can be applied anywhere, from music to video games.

At first glance, reviewing looks easy: hey, I get to tell people what I think, and they have to listen! This is great! Beware, however, because good reviewing includes much more than your opinion. You must back up your feelings with support if you want to influence anyone. Try to explain why you felt a certain way, what it was about the literature that moved you to enjoy it or not, instead of just telling the reader what you thought.

The literature review can follow virtually any format. Some are structured like a relaxed stroll in the park: they meander through the book from start to finish, writing about whatever strikes their fancy, a well-defined character here or a bad plot device here: in this type of review, you simply tell the reader what you saw as you went through the book.

Other reviews are like a guided tour of a city. They have a strict itinerary, with setting over here, characters over here and so on. These reviews tend to be nonlinear, jumping back and forth around the book to illustrate a point.

Each of these approaches has its advantages and disadvantages, and there is lots of middle ground between them. Choose one and stick with it.

Lots of reviewers like to recap some of the plot to give the reader some context, but you don't want to give away major plot points, since you don't want to ruin the story for your reader. If a certain scene illustrates something important about the book, sketch it in detail.

What can you write about in a review? Virtually anything: you can right about a book's plot, its narrative structure, its cohesion, its style, its tone, its characters, its pacing, its setting, the author's storytelling, or whatever else comes to mind. Your job is to help the reader decide whether or not to read the book, and so you can draw on any aspect of the work that helps you to do that. You never know what will strike the reader and make him or her say, oh, I get it. As long as you are connecting with your readers and helping them to make sense of the book, you are good to go.

Jay has been interested in family, finance and health issues for many years now.

Please visit his latest website about Binding Combs [http://bindingcombs.org/] which helps you find Plastic Comb Binding [http://bindingcombs.org/plastic-comb-binding/] and information, tips and pricing on all types of binding machines.

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Reviewing Classic Teen Literature - The Westing Game, A Wrinkle in Time, & Something Wicked This Way

Traditionally, young adult lit involves themes like forging your own identity and building self-acceptance. Recently, however, we've seen a noticeable increase in themes of forsaking your family to become undead, changing your personality to the point of unrecognizability, and feasting on human blood to nourish a fetus that your husband will eventually have to chomp out of your womb. (No, we aren't making this up). For those of us who miss the good ol' days when reading teen lit made you feel better about life (as opposed to in need of a long shower), it might be a good investment to pick up some of the following classic reads.

Despite the countless ways in which Ray Bradbury can put us ill at ease, his 1962 coming-of-age novel Something Wicked This Way Comes actually has a wholesome message at its core. Beneath all the carnies and funhouses, that is. The story follows two thirteen-year-olds named Will and Jim, whose visit to the traveling circus gets them involved with a wicked witch, a magic carousel, and a guy who has tattooed both their faces on his hands. (Clearly, this predates the cameraphone.)

For whatever reason, Jim is drawn to all things dangerous, creepy, or both, and desperately wants to ride the carousel that can instantly turn him into an adult à la Tom Hanks in Big. Will, on the other hand, enjoys being thirteen and has absolutely no desire to pursue adulthood through unnatural means. (Clearly, this predates VH1.) With the help of Will's father, the two learn how to kill evil with a smile - literally - and laugh in the face of insecurity, even when that face is your own. Only Ray Bradbury can pull off something like that while still managing to scare the crap out of you.

Published in the same year, Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is a similarly offbeat novel that reads like something out of a David Bowie acid flashback. Our teen heroine is Meg Murray, a self-proclaimed, self-loathing freak whose face is horribly disfigured by - get this - braces. (Okay, so standards were different in 1962.) Also noteworthy is the fact that she travels to a planet called Camazotz with the help of four exploded stars and a time/space-folding procedure called a tesserract. Yeah, we've all been there.

Through her travels, Meg learns to let go of everyone's helping hands (literally - she was practically glued to the things), see her "faults" as things that could "come in very handy," and ultimately fly solo to solve her own problems. The story climaxes with Meg defeating a giant, pulsating brain through the power of love. If that ain't symbolism... well, we're actually kind of hoping the whole thing is symbolism.

Sixteen years later, Ellen Raskin published The Westing Game, challenging the then-prevalent idea that young adults couldn't follow stories with ridiculously complicated plots. (Clearly, publishers were unfamiliar with Tolkien.) Its heroine is Tabitha-Ruth Alice "Turtle" Wexler, a thirteen-year-old who is trapped in her pretty sister's shadow but nevertheless gets major kudos for being nicknamed after a lumpy reptile. Turtle and her family are involved in an elaborate inheritance puzzle that sets an entire apartment complex's worth of people against one another for $200 million in loot.

Amidst the endless characters, unexpected bombings, anonymous tips, and false leads, Turtle demonstrates business savvy, goodheartedness, and independent thinking; she invests her "incentive" funds to profit independently of the riddle, attempts to fall on the sword for her mad bomber of a sister, and solves the puzzle even though the game ends and the prize is withdrawn. By befriending and impressing the benefactor, Turtle then goes on to prove that you don't have to be a beautiful young thang to get your mitts on an old man's multi-million dollar inheritance.

Growing up is hard enough as it is without television and magazines telling kids to hurry up and buy into adult things. Admittedly, literature is as bound to market trends as anything else, but until books start selling ad space between chapters, we'd like to think of them as a refuge for the mind. And if novels about black-magic carnivals, interplanetary time warps, and pyrotechnic treasure hunts can somehow present well-balanced young adult characters, any story that doesn't is definitely not trying hard enough.

Shmoop is an online study guide for Literature, novels like The Westing Game, A Wrinkle in Time, Something Wicked This Way Comes and many more. Its content is written by Ph.D. and Masters students from top universities, like Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale who have also taught at the high school and college levels. Teachers and students should feel confident to cite Shmoop.

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Grant Writing - Not Reviewing the Literature - Mistake 2 of 7 to Avoid When Approaching Funders

Federal government agencies, foundations and corporations get turned off by grant proposals that:

Are off-topic;
Have been tried elsewhere;
Give a negative tone;
Come from an applicant, not a client perspective;
Lack adequate infrastructure;
Include lots of unsupported assumptions; and
Look for quick fixes. In this article, you will learn mistake 2 of 7 to avoid when approaching funders: not reviewing the literature. Failure to find out if your project or idea has been tried elsewhere could lead to your rejection. The solution is here, too, so you don't make this mistake in the future.

Most of the time, our ideas are not new. In fact, one researchaer (Meador 1985) found that as many as one-third of all proposals submitted to a funder who was seeking innovative ideas were for projects that had been tried elsewhere.

If the idea for which you seek funding is indeed unique, great. If you're anything like most of my students, after reviewing the literature - offline and online - they realize that they are not alone in the universe. In fact, many find programs doing almost exactly what they want to do someplace else.

Solution

Economically, it is far more efficient and far-reaching to build on what has been done successfully than starting from scratch. Surprisingly, you can still make your idea unique, even if it has been tried elsewhere.

To make your idea unique when tried before, here are six steps to reviewing the literature and avoiding this mistake:

Search online - Search on the Internet using keywords that best represent your idea or program, like child care, child development, daycare, early childhood, preschool.
Search offline - Identify professional associations in your industry, such as the National Association for the Education of Young Children, Association for Childhood Education International. Review their journals and websites.
Identify 1-3 programs doing what you want to do, like Montessori.
Interview the director of each program.
Summarize in 1-3 paragraphs what each program has already accomplished, methodologies used, failings, successes, stumbling blocks.
Include this summary in the "methods" section of your proposal. Then, leverage your proposal in a way that builds on the successes of the other programs.
Subtle improvement of what works is easier, faster and more fundable than starting from scratch. In the eyes of the funder, building on a review and summary of the literature - online and offline - will demonstrate that you've done your homework.

And now I would like to invite you to claim your free subscription to the Grant Writing Newsletter when you visit http://GrantWritingNewsletter.com.

From Phil Johncock - The Grant Writing Professor

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.