Assignment: Book Review Guidelines
If you get the opportunity to review a book for a scholarly journal, you will have to follow guidelines and meet the word requirement. This guideline is shamelessly copied with a few adjustments from the Texas state Historical Association's.
1. Complete the review on or before the assigned date.
2. All reviews should be typed and double-spaced with sufficient margins for legible copy-editing.
3. A review of a single book should be approximately 600 words long. If for some special reason you find it necessary to exceed this limit, please indicate why.
4. Quotations from the book can be effective, but please keep them short, quote accurately, and indicate the location (page number) of each quotation, even if you quote only a word or phrase.
5. When referring to other published works within your review, please include the publisher and publication date (or, at the very least, publication date) in parentheses following the author and title of the work.
6. Include in your review a brief summary of scope, purpose, and content of the book and its significance in the literature on the subject. Include also an evaluation of the author's success in achieving purpose, use of available sources, and organization and presentation of material.
7. The evaluation of the book may be favorable or unfavorable, but the review in all cases should avoid personality issues and express criticism in courteous, temperate terms. However much the reviewer may disagree with the author's point of view and conclusions, the reviewer's obligation to the author and to the readers of the review is to provide a fair and balanced statement of the book's contents and conclusions. The reviewer should avoid digressive essays that might well appear in his own works. A book can seldom be fairly criticized for not being another book.
8. Do not list typographical or other minor errors unless they significantly impair the value of the book. A review is not the place for such a list of errata, though a private letter to the author might be helpful.
Text Book: Richard B. McCaslin, "Guidelines for Book Reviewers," Texas State Historical Association.