Ellen Karsh, a writer and former director of the Mayor’s Office of Grants Administration, in New York, and Arlen Sue Fox, associate executive director for development at Sunnyside Community Services, also in New York, significantly update this edition from 2005 by including interviews with grant makers about how the current… More >>
The Only Grant-Writing Book You’ll Ever Need: Top Grant Writers and Grant Givers Share Their Secrets

This is the third in a series of articles with brain-tempting tips that will enable you to make your dream of authoring a book become your reality. Leaders today have a book. The best business decision you can make is to write a book as it provides you instant credibility.

Here are the final powerful secrets to infuse your brain with the write idea.

1. Making appointments with yourself in your personal planner or PDA will ensure you get some writing done. Often what gets written down gets done and your writing time is no exception.

2. Establish realistic time lines for long-range goals. View target dates with flexibility in mind. Be prepared to change direction temporarily if circumstances dictate it. Three thirty-minute writing sessions may be more realistic than one session of one and a half hours. Do not put undo pressure on yourself or you will act in a counter-productive manner and will find excuses not to write.

3. If you are watching television and the show is not really capturing your interest, take that time to write. If you have materials readily available and organized then shifting your attention to writing rather than watching won’t be a problem. This applies equally well to other activities that aren’t capturing your interest.

4. You write more effectively and efficiently by taking regular breaks during long writing sessions. Taking breaks is using your time wisely. The breaks allow the sub-conscious to take over and generate new ideas. Make sure you record these brilliant revelations!

5. Take one lunch hour per week. Eat a quickie lunch and use the time to write. Is there a library or quiet spot near your workplace where you can go? Is writing in your car out of the question? What about staying at your desk while others are away having lunch?

6. If you commute to work by train or bus or car pool, you can use that time to write. If you’re usually the driver, perhaps you can be a carpool passenger once or twice a week so you can write during the trip. Make sure your car-pooling partners are aware of what you want to do during the commute. On vacation trips or other long drives, write while your spouse drives. Drivers are usually content to watch the road and concentrate on driving, so they will not miss your conversation.

7. Be ready to pounce. If a window of opportunity presents itself to get some extra writing time, pounce on it. These unscheduled spontaneous writing sessions are often most productive. Appreciate the fact that you must be ready to take advantage of these situations. These are golden opportunities to do something you love to do. Go for it!

8. View your practical every-day writing as an opportunity to hone your writing skills. It’s attitude that’s important here. Those thank-you notes, staff memos, friendly letters, emails, journal entries and special reports are all writing exercises that give you an opportunity to work on the skills of written communication. You can learn a great deal by writing in all situations. There is always a carry-over to other writing circumstances.

9. Keep writing tools (pen and paper) handy at all times in all places where you just might get the opportunity to write.

10 Writing breeds more writing. The more writing becomes a habit the more it happens. Research says it takes 21 repetitions to break an old habit and establish a new one. Writing for 5-15 minutes per day for 21 consecutive days should establish this writing as a regular habit. So give yourself a reasonable target of 21 repetitions to establish new writing behaviors.

11. Write quickly. Write legibly. Write legible scribbling if necessary. Use abbreviations like w for with and acronyms and the first parts of longer words only. If the only person who is going to read your notes is you, you can take whatever liberties you want to in order to get your ideas on paper and keep the flow going. Scribble now and translate later.

12. As you are writing, put new ideas in the margin of the paper as soon as they come to you. You won’t interrupt the flow of your thoughts on the page because you already have some key words to help you and you have already been writing. Slow down to record your new ideas, but don’t stop!

13. Use the Cloze method of reading for your writing. One technique for teaching students to read is to provide a paragraph with words missing. Students have to fill in the blanks with words suggested by the context of the paragraph. Use this same method to speed up your writing. Insert a straight line in your writing for words that you will know by context when it comes to transcribing your draft copy. Put a _______ in your writing as a placeholder.

14. Use acronyms in your draft copy. You can use the authentic conventional acronyms or you can invent some of your own. For example, ataw could mean Awaken The Author Within or b for book.

15. Learn to cover the page. Think in terms of starting every page as if you are going to cover it with writing as quickly as possible with quality ideas. Thinking this way will help you accomplish more writing.

Implementing these tips will get you off to the WRITE start.

Before commencement of book review writing, you should distinguish between two terms: book report and book review. Many people use these terms in the same breath, however there are vital differences in the very essence of these notions.

Book Review and Book Report – Is There a Difference?

A book report has a factual emphasize. It is a factual account of the subject matter of the book, which implies to be descriptive rather than persuasive and analytical. Its aim is to present the content and the structure of the book as objectively as possible. The book report includes a plot summary; it doesn’t look into deeper meanings of the book and doesn’t contain the identification of the symbolism.

Book report writing is a good way to structure and articulate the thoughts about the book you’ve just read. In a nutshell, it is simply a summary of the contents of the book.

A book review is a critical evaluation of the book that provides a thoughtful and in-depth analysis, and evaluation of the main idea, and purpose of the book. It is also a kind of reaction paper, which analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the book in terms of accepted historical and literary standards, supporting this evaluation with evidences from the text. In a word, it presents the assessment of the quality, meaning, and significance of the book.

What, in fact, sets book reviews apart from book reports is their personal character. Book reviews are highly personal and reflect the opinions of the reviewer on the given literary work. In the book review the reviewer clearly states his position and impressions regarding the book under consideration.

Structure of Book Review

The structure of book reviews resembles other types of academic writing. Book reviews usually comprise of a thesis statement, a supporting body paragraph, and a conclusion.

Typically, reviews are succinct, they rarely exceed 1000 words. Book reviews usually comprises of two elements: descriptive and evaluative. In the descriptive element you provide the essential information about the title, author, type of book, and general subject matters. While in the evaluative element you should present the assessment of the book, particularly of the perceived ideas and implied purposes, quoting exemplary passages from the text.

A good book review is well organized, and as well as the critical assessment and analysis it elucidates the essence of the literary work. Book reviews may vary in tone, style, and subject; however they share the common structure.

• Begin your Book Review with Introduction

Your introduction will bristle with factual and descriptive data, including the name of the author, some relevant details about his life and creative work, the title of the book, and the main theme of the given piece.

The second component of the introduction is the thesis of the book, which may be very perplexing to uncover since stories, novels, and plays don’t explicitly state the argument. Though, you should reveal this special angle and novelty of the piece that will actually become the ground for your further discussion and evaluation and allow you to make your book review original.

The introduction infers to be descriptive; however it should be catchy to seize the attention of the readers. So you should choose an interesting form of presenting your thoughts and ideas to make sure that the readers will keep on reading your book review up to the end. Many writers begin their book reviews with a quip or an anecdote that delivers their argument.

• Keep on Summarizing

Second, you should give your readers a concise summary of the literary work, where you state the author’s purpose of writing the book, provide its leading idea, compare and contrast main characters.

Here your aim is to plunge the readers into the atmosphere of the book, to make them interested in the ideas discussed in this literary piece, and to uncover them your understanding of the symbolism and implicit themes contained in the book. To reach this goal you should articulate your thoughts clearly, logically, and make your argument persuasive and sound.

In the course of making critical assessment of the literary work, you’ll have to back your arguments and assertions with concrete evidences from the text. Remember that critical assessment implies not only to analyze the literary piece under review, but also to tell your readers what struck you the most in this book, whether or not reading it was effective, persuasive, and exciting, and also your discussion on how it enhanced your understanding of the issue at hand.

Your analysis and evaluation should be organized into separate paragraphs that deal with particular aspects of your argument. You don’t necessarily should work chronologically through the book, though, you should make the structure of your summary logical and comprehensive for the readers.

• Draw a logic conclusion

Sum up and restate your thesis or make the final judgment regarding the book in the conclusion. Don’t introduce any new ideas and evidence for your argument, make up your conclusion copious with the ideas that extend the logic of your thesis statement.

Harnessing these simple and winning strategies of book review writing, you’ll surely turn your work into a writing marvel.