Web Authoring Book Review
Fall 2009

Description

The product or event review is an important and widely used genre of web writing. It provides content of interest to a wide range of users; is often a good way to attract attention to your website, no matter the topic of the site; is a way of entering into dialogue (directly or indirectly) with other web authors; and is a rich method for adding context for your site (to your project, your work, etc.) by presenting, in the form of a review, relations between the content of your site and one or more other products.

The first major page of your final project will be a review page with an accompanying sidebar of blurbed links related to the subject(s)/product(s) of your review(s). The default assignment is a book review, but we can discuss other products (or events) for review. Whatever the object of your review(s), the page (excluding the sidebar and any long quotes) must contain at least 1200 words of writing (equivalent to about 4 double-spaced pages of printed text).

As discussed, the book should be a recent (as recent as possible but within the past five years) book related to your site topic and of likely interest to your intended site users. Also, it must be approved by the instructor.

You may review multiple books or other products, but need to discuss this with the instructor.

We'll look at several examples of online reviews in the next class. Here are two examples with which to start:

• Sander Bauman reviews Book review: The Wayfinding Handbook and Book review: Identity 2.0.
• Cal Evans reviews PHP and MySQL by Example.

Note: Supplying access to a chapter list/table of contents for the book via a link (e.g., to the publisher's website) or other supplementary device is a good EXTRA feature for a book review, and one I recommend; but it should NOT be included in the body the review, as Evans does in his review.

Requirements

Full list of content, coding, and design requirements is forthcoming. For now (i.e., for the text), refer to the list of reqs specified in the Week Five homework (due Week Six).

Here are basic requirements for the page:

• Length: 1200-1500 words.
• The review text should begin with a catchy NARRATIVE or otherwise engaging introductory section. To get a sense of this, look at how "Gaming Evolves" begins.
• Standard book publication information in separate "item" div: author, title, publisher, year of pub., number of pages, number of illustrations, etc.
• Review text divided into short paragraphs and at least three subsections, each with its own title in a heading tag.
• Three images in addition to (optional) product and author image(s). Each image should have a caption, a title, and (linked) source information if the image is not of your own creation.
• A few quotes from the book under review with page numbers in parentheses after the quote.
• At least three in-text links in the review text (as I'm using for the term "pull quote" below).
• At least one pull quote from your text. (See pull quote article and linked examples at HTML DOG; Griffiths's third example is esp. interesting). Note: A pull quote is a quote from your writing, not from the book or other product(s) under review.

Note: the word count of 1200-1500 words excludes block quotes.

The review should not simply summarize the book but should describe and evaluate it critically. For some content guidelines, see On Writing Book Reviews.

Here are a few special requirements for the page:

• Standard book information should be enhanced with Believer-style book information; for example:
  
• Nine link blurbs in a sidebar.
• Site banner

Visual Matter

Your page will need to have at least three informative figures (illustrations). Images should be of good viewing dimensions: not too small and not too big.

For each image you select you'll need to record the following information:

• Subject (the pictured object or person)
• Creator (of the image and/or of the pictured object, artwork, etc.)
• Source (website where you located the image, book or periodical from which you scanned the image)
• Web address of the source (if a website) or bibliographical data (if scanned from a print source)

For (informative) graphics, we'll use the figure microformat to better structure our markup. Again, this will be something we cover in class.

Researching

It is STRONGLY suggested that you look at, and in the body of your text refer and link to, two or three other discussions of your book or its author that you find on the web.

Saving Your Review Page

Save your Review Page and related files in your "drafts" folder on Eden. Save images in the images folder inside your drafts folder.

Submitting Review Page Draft

You'll need to post a link to your Review Page in a reply to the "Review Page" thread on your section's Class Forum. We'll do this in class; so just make sure that your Review Page is saved to the correct folder on Eden.