How to write a brilliant essay review in 30 minutes
Essay reviews are the tools that you use to show your professors that you actually read and thought about what you read. These essays are commonly chosen by professors after students have read a handful of texts during the course of a week. Many professors will either assign a question that they want answered in the essay review or they will let their students develop the question on their own. The essay will answer the question using the texts to develop that answer.
Read the Texts When They are Assigned
In order to write a brilliant essay review in 30 minutes (or less), you should actually read the texts before you begin to write. The key to writing quickly is having the knowledge in your head or highlighted in the texts. As you read through the texts, make note of your thoughts during the reading and mark those thoughts in the margins. Highlight passages that get your attention and not what those passages make you think about because you will be able to use those in the essay review.
Develop the Question into a Thesis
If you professor gives you a question, that question needs to be developed into the thesis statement. Do not start the review with the thesis, but use it to develop the introduction. The question can help you choose the introduction method and one of the best is to begin with a quote from one your texts. Then you can explain the quote and build right into the thesis statement.
Do Not Do Any Research
Writing an essay review does not require any research. You have already done that with your reading. You now take that reading and analyze what it means. Use the highlighted text to help you develop the analysis. Include quotes and paraphrases in the essay and explain what those mean to you and how those quote interact with each other. You can also show how the quotes work with the other texts that you had to read.
Build a Theme, Not a Summary
The idea behind an essay review is that you are writing a review of the texts. It is like a movie review, but you are also showing relationships that are developed between the readings that you had to do. It is acceptable to include brief summaries (usually three sentences or less) and then highlight the main ideas and lessons you took from the text. Then, you need to go deeper and show the real, thematic meaning of the texts to really get into a deep, profound, and interesting review.