Book Review - The Essay You Cant Read by Ken Varnia

Book Review - 'The Essay You Can't Read' by Ken VarniaEssay Writing Help and Techniques - 'The Essay You Can't Read' by Ken Varnia - I have to say this book was so helpful to me that I read it over, listening to podcasts of audio books, and learning other techniques as I went. It had everything from a 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy for your essay questions to a way to draw on student and teacher knowledge to help with some essay topics. There were also many helpful materials to help you organize your thoughts.'The Essay You Can't Read' helps you use a set of criteria to decide whether you should ask students to respond or not. I recommend it because I did something similar in my school and most all the time, the response wasn't positive. Here is a summary of some of the things Ken does in this book:Give students a reason to respond: If your goal is to show students how to create an essay that makes them want to respond, this is the most important part of the book. There are two reaso ns this works. One, you want students to want to respond and two, you want students to think of ways to explain what they meant when they said no. Both can be answered in this book.Show students how to properly structure an essay: The use of the dictionary for example, includes an introduction, conclusion, author's first name, and last name. Once students know this, the essay becomes easy to read and follow. It also makes it easier to construct a paragraph based on the definitions. I found that by separating parts of the sentence into questions, it made the paragraph easier to read.Interrogate the student- you should know that students like to provide examples to back up their statements, but you also have to figure out how they are going to do that when you ask them to respond. This is where the process essay questions come in. 'The Essay You Can't Read' has some excellent strategies for helping the student to show you how to apply the questions to real life situations.Make sure th at your essay is accurate: When writing a paper, you are often asked to make assumptions about other people and their cultures. There are some wonderful tips for making sure that the facts in your essay are correct. Ken Varnia also knows how to use her audience to help make the writing sound more accurate. She has this 'voice' to make it sound like an objective opinion and not like a personal attack.Make sure that your essay is well written: People often leave papers with errors on the first page or the last page. This is a very common mistake and is usually because the writer lacks the required editing skills. You should invest the time needed to proofread your work before submitting it.The Essay You Can't Read' was very helpful to me, but I still feel that I could have benefited from additional tools and other reading material to help my students get better at answering essay questions. As always, I recommend that you research the topic you are writing about thoroughly and follow the lesson plan given in the class. I hope you enjoy the book and the lesson plan as much as I did.