Book Review Outline
Question description
Hand in your Detailed Outline for the Book Review. To successfully complete this assignment, you must write a detailed outline of your book review.
The outline is important for two reasons. First, it will help you to organize your thoughts and the information you have gathered from your reading. An effective detailed outline gives you the framework of your book review, and also helps you figure out where and how you will place your citations. The process of drafting an outline also enables you to identify and correct gaps in the logical flow of your book review. You will be required to write a detailed outline of your thesis, when you take your Masters Thesis Capstone Course, so this exercise will help you prepare for that as well.
As you know, in legal writing, you must ensure that every assertion you make is supported by authority. In your book review, just as with any other writing, everything you write that is not your own original idea or conclusion or a universally known fact must be supported by reference to either primary or secondary authority. An outline gives you a general picture of how each section of your book review will be structured, and of the authority you will cite in support of that structure. If you write a thorough outline, you will, in effect, be filling in the gaps when you start writing your first draft. Your outline will ultimately be a working document. If you do additional research and expand your ideas, you should likewise expand the outline. Again – this will make writing your first draft much easier.
The outline you turn in will be at least two pages in length, and will include the introduction, the major sections of the book review, and the conclusion. The outline will clearly show the framework of your book review. Your citations will be in proper Bluebook academic citation format (footnotes).
A sample detailed outline is located in your Week 5 Lesson. Bear in mind that this outline is a formal submission. Pay close attention to citation format, writing mechanics, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure, as well as to structure and content. Additionally, you will find a link to the Online Library’s Campus Guide on Book Reviews below.