Book Review

This semester we have learned lots of writing skills and the steps of how to write an essay from the book “Steps to Writing Well” written by Jean Wyrick. This book guides us to write a variety of essays by following the steps from the basic elements to the advanced skills which provides us an elementary direction to the world of writing. In the following, we would make a brief introduction of this book

When composing works, we need to pay attention to several problems. Firstly, discover our audience is important. We have to change our style of writing and the form of composing our works so as to meet different readers request. Remember to organize our writings with clear thesis statements; we should not bore them with confusion, and disorder. Thus, to interest the readers with a sexy topic is really important. Also, choose to describe things in objective or subjective way. Different writing categories such as argumentations and descriptions have different writing methods. Secondly, try to convince the readers with abundant evidences to support our ideas. Besides, we can make our essays vivid by using sensory details. Thirdly, after finishing writing the articles, we have to revise them. Think of the questions such as whether the topics are too broad or too narrow, does specific ideas support our viewpoint and so on. Grammar, punctuation, word choice and usage are also what we should pay attention to. In addition, we could also ask someone else to look over our works, because with their help, we could find out more faults that we have not realized. Last but not the least, we have to write down the citation in a proper format.

All of these writing skills are contained in the book and really offers us a clear and complete guideline to writing well. Besides the brief introduction of this book, the following are some of the favorite chapters we think of as the most important and impress us the most.

To begin with, we discussed about which chapter is our favorite one. Most of us thought that Chapter 18 “Writing about Film” is the most impressive and interesting chapter. Sophia’s group introduced about how to analyze a film, and the clips they chose made their report become more abundant. We also connected this chapter with Jerome’s film class and Stewart’s movie discussion class. Then, we turned to regard some important writing skills when we are going to organize an essay. Recognizing your purpose and choosing the topic carefully should be consider in the first place. Knowing who the readers are, trying to interest and convince them with your unique viewpoints and feelings are significant. In addition, providing specific examples to support your ideas, building the arguments and giving out your position are necessary, too. In chapter 10, using appropriate tone and seeing the opposite points of view could help us to fight against those people who have opposite opinions.

Afterwards, the problems we should avoid became our discussing topic. In chapter 20 and 21, the usage of grammar and punctuation are pointed out. The order of time and space and the transitional words between each paragraph are also needed to be considered. Besides, we learned how to put the source and the author’s name in a correct form in chapter 14. The citation made the reference we used clearly. When we are going to write an article, remember to use the concise words and keep asking “why”. It can help us to express our meanings more concrete. At last, by the process of revising, our defects of writing can be improved. It is the only way to make our articles become better and smoothly.