Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage
Composition 2 English 1102		Contact Form

Writing a Review

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Begin your review with an introduction appropriate to your assignment. If your assignment asks you to review only one book or article and not to use outside sources, your introduction will focus on identifying the author, the title, the main topic or issue presented in the book or article, and the author's purpose for writing. If your assignment asks you to review the book or article as it relates to issues or themes discussed in the course, or to review two or more writings on the same topic, your introduction must also encompass those expectations. For example, before you can review two writings on a topic, you must explain to your reader in your introduction how they are related to one another. Within this shared context (or under this "umbrella") you can then review comparable aspects of both writings, pointing out where the authors agree and differ. In other words, the more complicated your assignment is, the more your introduction must accomplish. Finally, the introduction to a book or article review is always the place for you to establish your position as the reviewer (your thesis about the author's thesis). Consider the following questions:

• Is the piece a memoir, a treatise, a collection of facts, an extended argument, etc.? Is the article a documentary, a write-up of primary research, a position paper, etc.?
• Who is the author? What does the preface or foreword tell you about the author's purpose, background, and credentials? What is the author's approach to the topic (as a journalist, a historian, a researcher)?
• What is the main topic or problem addressed? How does the work relate to a discipline, to a profession, to a particular audience, or to other works on the topic?
• What is your critical evaluation of the work (your thesis)? Why have you taken that position? What criteria are you basing your position on?

Provide an overview. An overview supplies your reader with certain general information not appropriate for including in the introduction but necessary to understanding the body of the review. Generally, an overview describes your book or article's division into chapters, sections, or points of discussion. An overview may also include background information about the topic, about your stand, or about the criteria you will use for evaluation. The overview and the introduction work together to provide a comprehensive beginning for (a "springboard" into) your review. Consider the following questions:

• What are the author's basic premises? What issues are raised, or what themes emerge? What situation (i.e., racism on college campuses) provides a basis for the author's assertions?
• How informed is my reader? What background information is relevant to the entire piece and should be placed here rather than in a body paragraph?

Organize the body of your review according to a logical plan. Here are two options:

1. First, summarize, in a series of paragraphs, those major points from the piece that you plan to discuss; incorporating each major point into a topic sentence for a paragraph is an effective organizational strategy. Second, discuss and evaluate these points in a following group of paragraphs. (There are two dangers lurking in this pattern — you may allot too many paragraphs to summary and too few to evaluation, or you may re-summarize too many points from the piece in your evaluation section.)

2. Summarize and evaluate the major points you have chosen from the piece in a point-by-point schema. That means you will discuss and evaluate point one within the same paragraph (or in several if the point is significant and warrants extended discussion) before you summarize and evaluate point two, point three, etc., moving in a logical sequence from point to point to point. Here again, it is effective to use the topic sentence of each paragraph to identify the point from the book or article that you plan to summarize or evaluate With either pattern, consider the following questions:
   • What are the author's most important points? How do these relate to one another? (Make relationships clear by using transitions: "In contrast," "an equally strong argument," "moreover," "a final conclusion," etc.).
   • What types of evidence or information does the author present to support his or her points? Is this evidence convincing, controversial, factual, one-sided, etc.? (Consider the use of primary historical material, case studies, narratives, recent scientific findings, statistics.)
   • Where does the author do a good job of conveying factual material as well as personal perspective? Where does the author fail to do so? If solutions to a problem are offered, are they believable, misguided, or promising?
   • Which parts of the work (particular arguments, descriptions, chapters, etc.) are most effective and which parts are least effective? Why?
   • Where (if at all) does the author convey personal prejudice, support illogical relationships, or present evidence out of its appropriate context?

Use the conclusion to state your overall critical evaluation. You have already discussed the major points the author makes, examined how the author supports arguments, and evaluated the quality or effectiveness of specific aspects of the book or article. Now you must make an evaluation of the work as a whole, determining such things as whether or not the author achieves the stated or implied purpose and if the work makes a significant contribution to an existing body of knowledge. Consider the following questions:

• Is the work appropriately subjective or objective according to the author's purpose?
• How well does the work maintain its stated or implied focus? Does the author present extraneous material? Does the author exclude or ignore relevant information?
• How well has the author achieved the overall purpose of the book or article? What contribution does the work make to an existing body of knowledge or to a specific group of readers? Can you justify the use of this work in a particular course?
• What is the most important final comment you wish to make about the book or article? Do you have any suggestions for the direction of future research in the area? What has reading this work done for you or demonstrated to you?

Note that the length of your introduction and overview, the number of points you choose to review, and the length of your conclusion should be proportionate to the page limit stated in your assignment and should reflect the complexity of the material being reviewed as well as the expectations of your reader.

Remember foremost that an analytic or critical review of a book or article is not primarily a summary; rather, it comments on and evaluates the work. This is especially important to remember when doing academic research. A literature review (as a kind of paper or as a section of a longer research paper) strings together a set of such commentaries to map out the current range of positions on a subject. The writer can then define his or her own position in the rest of the research paper. Often it is useful to keep questions like these in mind as you read your research materials analytically:

1. What overall purpose of the book or article? (Reading the preface, acknowledgments, bibliography, and index can be helpful in answering this question. Also consider the author's background and the publisher when thinking about a book's purpose.)

2. What is the author's thesis? What are the author's assumptions? Are the assumptions discussed explicitly?

3. How well does the author's content support the thesis? (Here you can quote from your source to show not only the author's overall structure and plan, but also to show the author's style and tone, as well as the author's ability to use materials to make an argument in support of the thesis.)

4. How does the author present the work? (Does he/she present primary documents or secondary material, literary analyses, personal observations, statistical data, biographical or historical information?)

5. Does the author present alternative approaches (alternative theses) to his subject or topic? Does the author present counter-arguments to alternative theses?

6. What exactly does the book or article contribute to your subject or academic discipline? What general problems and concepts in your discipline and course does this book or article discuss?

7. What theoretical issues are raised for further discussion?

8. What are your own reactions toward the work? Compare your reactions to the book or article to the reviews/reactions of others. Look at journals in your academic discipline or general publications such as New York Review of Books or London Review of Books.

Finally, remember that a review's goal is to discuss the book's or article's approach to the subject, not to discuss the subject itself.

Below is an example of a review that I published in Network (December 1990) of V. Prakasam's The Linguistic Spectrum.

The Linguistic Spectrum. By V. Prakasam.
Patiala: Punjabi University, 1985. xii + 120.

Reviewed by Daniel Kies, College of DuPage.

The Linguistic Spectrum contains thirteen chapters that are based on previously published articles or conference papers Prakasam had written over a period of ten years. The title of the book -- employing the spectrum metaphor -- suggests a linguistic analysis marked by thoroughness, generality, gradience, and coherence between all the subsystems of language. The spectrum metaphor also suggests that a major goal of the book is to serve as a "bridge" between all the competing theories that comprise the spectrum of linguistic theory. Unfortunately, the book does not deliver on the promises of its title. Brevity works against Prakasam: those goals are too large to accomplish in a short volume.

The book is organized loosely by linguistic strata, beginning with language as sound and ending with language in community. Several chapters also give Prakasam the opportunity to compare directly the relative merits of competing linguistic theories. Chapter 1 ("Parametical Phonetics") begins with a cautionary tale about the need to keep distinct the parameters of phonetic description (physiological [= articulatory], acoustic, and auditory). Prakasam identifies weaknesses arising from the conflation of those parameters (using Telugu to exemplify the analysis). When discussing physiological phonetics, for example, Prakasam argues that descriptive and explanatory phonetic statements are better made by attending to all relevant phonetic parameters, such as the "active articulator" (pp. 2-3), rather than simply attending on theoretical grounds to a single parameter, such as the "passive place of articulation."

Chapter 2 ("Functional Phonology") begins with an all too brief comparison of Praguian, Generative, and Systemic phonology and moves to a discussion of syntagmatic and paradigmatic features in the functional analysis of sound systems. A contribution to functional phonology is Prakasam's notion of a dynamic" function of syntagmatic phonological features (pp. 13 18). The chapter reviews the traditional distributive and demarcative functions of sound segments, but Prakasam adds a dynamic function to those sounds that are active in phonological alternations (sandhi contexts). The dynamic function, Prakasam argues, predicts the direction of sound changes in a sandhi context. Prakasam's phonological analyses demonstrates the value of functionalism in linguistic analysis, illustrating how the functionalism and pragmatism of neo-Firthian phonology admirably explains several problems in Telugu phonetics and phonology that form-oriented neo-Chomskians can only list as exceptions to phonological rules. (See Prakasam 1976, 1977, and 1979 for more extensive discussions of many of those points.)

Chapter 3 ("Ordering of Phonological Rules") and Chapter 6 ("Case Relations and Realizations") are curiosities. Having argued for the descriptive and explanatory value of Systemic functional) phonology in Chapters 1 and 2, Prakasam presents a two page chapter (Chapter 3) that argues for abstract phonological representations of a Generative sort and for all the trappings of Generative theory, including rule ordering. Similarly, Chapter 6 (drawn largely from Prakasam 1979-80) surveys the concept of grammatical case and its morphological and semantic treatment in traditional Indian, Generative, and Systemic theory. A large part of Prakasam's objective is to reconcile Generative and Systemic-Functional theory. Yet the strength of Systemic-Functional linguistics has always been the "directness" of the linguistic analysis. However, Chapters 3 and 6 do nothing to explain Prakasam's interest in abstract representations or rule ordering in the Generative sense. In fact, Chapter 3's most striking feature is the number of interesting, yet completely unmotivated, claims -- such as the hypothesized general rule ordering principle stating that rule governing morphologically conditioned sound changes apply to the underlying (abstract) representation before rules governing phonologically conditioned sound changes do.

By Prakasam's own admission, Chapter 4 ("Process Morphology") adds nothing to the discussion of morphology or allomorphic variation that has not already been discussed in the literature. The aim is solely to bring together Prosodic and Generative phonological approaches to some basic issues in allomorphic variation. However, Prakasam misses an excellent opportunity in this discussion of morphological variation: Prakasam only discusses phonologically and morphologically conditioned variation, never acknowledging the existence of stylistically conditioned variation, and thereby missing the chance to draw parallels between this chapter and two later chapters which apply familiar concepts in stylistic/social variation to Telugu, Chapter 8 ("Sociogrammar" drawn largely from Prakasam 1981) and Chapter 9 ("Language Variation" drawn largely from Prakasam 1978).

Chapter 5 ("Auxiliaries and Auxiliarization") presents one of the few crosslinguistic analyses of gradience as a linguistic phenomenon: the chapter explores the cline in verb auxiliaries between suffixes at one end and full lexical verbs at the other in both English and Telugu. Chapter 7 ("Given-new Structuration") and Chapter 10 ("Psychological Plausibility") review very familiar problems from a crosslinguistic perspective. Chapters 5, 7, and 10 are interesting in that Prakasam looks at familiar Systemic concepts from a crosslinguistic perspective but the remaining chapters -- 11, 12, and 13 -- report Prakasam's efforts to build bridges between cultures and linguistic traditions.

Chapter 11 ("The Systems and Apoha Theory") presents Prakasam's strongest attempt to build a bridge between Systemic theory (using Firth's concept of systems) and the traditional Indian linguistics (in the form of the Buddhist theory of meaning, Apoha). Arguing that every positive choice in a system implies a negation of the other choices offered but not chosen, Prakasam sees parallels to the Buddhist logician's view that meaning is largely negative in character, "that words have no direct reference to objective realities" (p. 90). Here Prakasam misses a chance to draw additional parallels to contemporary literary theory and to Deconstruction.

Chapter 12 ("Comparative Pedagogical Theory") describes some of the linguistic and pedagogic problems surrounding second language learning and teaching in India. Prakasam begins by outlining the goals of comparative descriptive linguistics and then conveys some of the conflict between linguists and "pedagogues." The chapter concludes by highlighting the value of "comparative pedagogical linguistics" in learning the syntax and semantics of verbs in Telugu, English, and Hindi.

Chapter 13 ("On Being Communal: A Sociolexical Study") is a plea for tolerance, briefly describing the human suffering arising through religious, caste, and language communalism.

The book does have its merits. Prakasam offers us a chance to read his work in one place: many of the articles are in hard to-locate journals, and the book does serve as a primer to much of Prakasam's linguistics in the period between 1972 and 1982. (Indeed, one often has the impression that this book serves only as a primer to the author's work, given that many of the complexities of Prakasam's analyses are glossed over so very briefly.) Further, the book summarizes in one place much of Prakasam's work on Telugu. Finally, The Linguistic Spectrum also offers Western linguists the chance to read a contemporary's efforts to marry the ancient and modern linguistic traditions of India with many of the linguistic theories of West.

All of those strengths are admirable and make fascinating reading. However, what works against those strengths are not only Prakasam's brevity but also a lack of contact with Systemic Functional (or any other) theory since the early 1970s. For example, Prakasam does not discuss several important works that are directly relevant to this effort, including M.A.K. Halliday & Ruqaiya Hasan's Cohesion in English (1976), M.A.K. Halliday's Language as a Social Semiotic (1978), or David Stampe's A Dissertation on Natural Phonology (1979) to name just three. Thus a book that has all the promise of an important contribution to Systemic-Functional linguistics and linguistics generally becomes instead a frustrating experience. One hopes that Prakasam produces a second edition, an edition in which Prakasam again paints the spectrum of linguistic thought, but this time with colors of a deeper hue on a much larger canvas.

Works Cited

Prakasam, V. "A Functional View of Phonological Features." Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. 10: 77-88, 1976.

 . "An Outline of the Theory of Systemic Phonology." International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics. 6: 24-41, 1977.

 . "General Remarks on Language Variation." In S. Agesthialingom and K. Karunakaran, Sociolinguistics and Dialectology, pp. 219-228. Annamalainagar: Annamalai University, 1978.

 . "Aspects of Sentence Phonology." Archivum Linguisticum. 10: 57-82, 1979.

 . "A Grammar of Telugu Postpositions." Language Forum. 5: 2-18, 1979-80.

 . "A Sociogrammatical Look at Telugu Pronouns." Studies in Anthropological Linguistics. 14: 87-93, 1981.

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