Reviewing the article tasks

Hey,
here are our answers to today's task.

Reviewing the article (Questions 6 to 14 by Hella and Miriam)

What does the author claim?

Even though many publications do not offer scholarly reviews anymore (if they do, they only publish reviews online), the author thinks that book reviews are still very important for intellectual life.

How does she support this?

1.       Worsham is of the opinion that writing book reviews is a good practice for both advanced doctoral students and new staff of the faculties when it comes to develop intellectual skills that are necessary for scholarly writing.

2.       Well written reviews do have important function within the scholarly community because everyone can make decisions based on the reviews.

3.       The number of reviews shows the scholarly reputation because the more reviews the higher reputation.

  

What is the overall appeal of the article (or lack thereof)? Give reasons.

With her article, Worsham wants to encourage people to go on writing reviews and publishing them. As pointed out before, the author is convinced that book reviews are necessary for the scholarly community. Her conviction includes the idea that book reviews are a good practice for scholars in terms of intellectual skills. In addition to this, reviews function as decision maker and show the scholars’ reputation.  

Do you agree or disagree with what the writer suggests? Why?

We agree to what the writer suggests. Even though we do not write scholarly reviews and thus reviews do not provide practice concerning our writing skills, scholarly reviews do help us on choosing books that we read and work with.

What options does the article suggest? Explain.

The answer and explanation to this question can be found in “How does she support this?”.

Do you know of any other writings on this theme? Do they coincide with what you think or what the author thinks?

Since this is the first time we have considered book reviews and how to write such pieces, we do not know any other writings on this theme yet.

Does the article provide any new insights for you or a larger reading audience?

The article provides some new insights for us. First, we did not know that you need to get permission to write a review. Secondly, we were not aware of the fact that you should only review the newest publications. Worsham points out that it takessome time until a review gets published and thus, it is of great importance to only write reviews on new publications.

Give your overall evaluation and recap your main reasons for this.

We think that the article is very well written and has a clear style. This makes it very easy to follow the thoughts of the author and understand her argumentation. There are no difficult words or phrases which also help to get the author’s point. Beneficial is also the fact that Worsham provides some tips on how to write a good review. We will keep this in mind for our action research on the reading list.

Would you recommend this article, and if so, to whom?

Yes, we would recommend the article to our fellow students because Worsham not only points out the importance of book reviews, but also provides tips for writing a good review.