Seek To Be Wise

Requirements; 300 words (minimum) (400 words maximum).

Please write an extended critical evaluation of the book.

Please fully introduce and summarize the reading selection so that well understand what youre critiquing later on in the body of your essay. You’ll do this concise description and introduction work in the first paragraph of your essay, before you deliver the thesis formulation that will guide your essay thereafter. (In order to be able to do that summary work effectively, you’ll need to have read your book slowly and carefully [and preferably more than once], annotating your text with questions and marginal comments as you go, glossing paragraphs for key points and examples that are advanced by the writer(s) to emphasize his/her most important points and arguments.)

Practice your summary skills here once more, slowly and methodically, as a way of helping you with your essay work in which youll be discussing and analyzing your book at length – something that can really only be done effectively if you’re able to summarize and synthesize the writing first.Finally, remember that a revised and condensed (3-5 sentences) version of this summary can be imported into the opening thesis paragraph of your eventual essay, as youll want to do the same thing there in condensed form that I want you to do here: introduce, describe and summarize your book selection to an imagined ignorant audience, using academic language and being careful to avoid any analysis or critical evaluation work.

Again though, please be extremely careful not to analyze the book here I do not want your evaluation of the writing or your opinion about its ideas, nor do I want you to quote the text anywhere in your summary description. This is summary work only, written for an ignorant audience whom you must assume has no idea about the work until you tell us (you are not writing for me, or for yourself – you are writing for someone who has not read the work but who needs to know about it).

Use only your own words – do not cite or quote the text at all in this assignment, and remember not to write about yourself but rather the text and only the text, describing what it’s about and how it’s built, slowly and carefully.

Don’t use the word “novel” to describe your book. A novel is fiction, stuff that’s made up, not real (e.g. mysteries, fantasies, romances, sci-fi stories, etc). None of you are reading or writing about novels here. You are all reading various types of NONfiction – things like memoirs, histories, investigative reports, etc. – things that are real, not imagined. Please don’t confuse or misidentify your book titles.

Remember that book titles are ALWAYS italicized, NEVER placed in “quotation marks” or underlined
In your paragraph, use the present verb tense to discuss the text, NOT the past tense: For example, you would write “The author of Silent Spring writes..” NOT “The author of Silent Spring wrote….” We adopt the artificial present tense in formal writing even though the text we’re writing about is clearly written in the past, and deals with events that happened even farther in the past. Treat the text like it and its author are sitting next to you as you write about it.

Use only the 3rd person voice (he, she, it, they, the reader, the editors, the text, etc.)

Do NOT use you or your or I or meanywhere in this assignment – that kind of language is used in personal narrative writing, not academic writing
Proofread your work carefully and repeatedly to eliminate all sentence-level errors before submission.  Watch out for things like spelling errors, sentence fragments and run-on’s, and problems with pronoun agreement, because these are things that will force me to return your work ungraded.