6 Effective steps to write a book review

Traditional book review procedures

Book review is intended to help friends or others to distinguish if the book is worth buying and reading; the book should comprise the reader’s desire in terms of required and reliable content. The book market is full of books teaching students and others how to write an appropriate book review. A review should cover 6 main criteria: organization and layout, visual aids, bibliography/table of context/index, sources creditability, writing style, and writer creditability. Many book publishing and reading platform allow the members to write a review of not more than 400 words and may be less. In Amazon for example, you can find irrelevant reviews like the one below

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

An extremely important book for anyone wanting to understand the field of urban planning. Beautifully written.

The reader here gave a 5 star to a book (Cities of tomorrow) in a very simple statement covering nothing of the proper book review. Moreover, you can find a lot of reviews comprising two or three words; saying the book is a great read or brilliant book. The amazing thing is a huge amount of readers buy the books based on these types of reviews and the books hit high ranking in sales and become best sellers regardless if the content is worth the purchase. Authors become proud because their book was downloaded for 50,000 times by asking friends and there colleagues to download their books to serve the marketing and sales strategy leaving books with excellent content on web-shelves with limited purchase. Moreover, Amazon and some other sites restrict excellent book reviewers from posting reviews because they haven’t passed the purchase limit $50.

In my recent year living in UK, I read 56 book subjects varied from urban design topics, urban planning topics, political economy, environment, geography, and architecture. All these books were purchased from: Amazon, Abe books, thrift, world of books, and retail stores in the market. I never missed the content that I wanted to read, but only one book from these 56 collections. I never read a book review on Amazon or any other platform produce book reviews like Goodreads, Librarything, Anobii, and others; all the books were worth the purchase and gave the relevant content I am searching for. Like other readers I look for specific content in a book on the contrary other readers might be looking just for a book to get an idea about specific subject or filed of knowledge. It becomes irritating to read these book reviews, including a couple of words in a world that produces a million titles per year and you can imagine how many books in specific field are there in the market. In this event readers lose not only valuable time in reading these types of worthless reviews but also a great amount of money if we consider a 50 book purchase per year.

When I was a student and i am looking for a book, I always write exactly what are the criteria, sub-subjects, and related intervening fields whether its architecture or engineering. I look for the book subject in general for example sustainability and looking for criteria like densities, green space, developing on deprived land, building orientation, building systems design, and many other criteria. In terms of this example how transport planning intervene sustainable architecture, external services impact on open space and building. Most times, to get to the point I read the introduction and specifically the writer’s introduction and look for what I am looking for; and this approach proved its success, and I never bought a book that was not worth the price.

The new procedure.

My approach in assessing the book I need is more efficient than most methods written in English literature concerning writing a book review. The 6 steps of writing a book review do not cover if compared to my method if it were planned to write a book review but only one step the book information creditability. Lot of professionals write books on specific subject in their genre field without even having a higher education degree; the book content is based on the knowledge collected from long year’s experience that does not relate to any creditable research lab, renown world organization publication and surveys like WHO, or from research published by famous publishing houses like McGraw-Hill publishing. Even creditability could be questioned and doubted in written reviews.

After long work experience in architecture, I have developed a new method that helps students and professionals decide what to search for and what to read. The method is developed from my approach in looking for books to read and my method of writing (My book Here about writing). The book review should cover various points; these points are in the answers of following questions.

· The writer and his relevant educational background and experience in the field?

· Who is the book for, the audience?

· What is the book theme?

· What message to the reader does the introduction give?

· Is it for educational purpose means it’s a research, theory related, or content for professional practice?

· How the ideas in the chapters are connected?

· The ideas of every chapter it’s to date relevance; how it is conveyed Graphs, statistics, numbers, studies?

· Does the book content reflect the title name?

· Does the book index give a clear idea on the book content?

· References are they from relevant studies, organizations publications, references from universities, best practices, and guidelines?

· Why am I reading this book? And what am I looking for?

These questions will not only help readers who intend to write reviews but for anyone to assess book content he is searching for. One of the great books I read in the beginning of my career is the urban design process, which I have applied this method when I wrote the book review; you can read the full book review here.