Updated 6 May 2025
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A book report can be defined as an objective summary of key ideas or arguments contained in a book. This task is frequently assigned to elementary, middle school, high school, and college students in the US. It’s aimed at fortifying or verifying their abilities to summarize and convey large written works precisely.
Hence, learning how to write a report correctly is crucial for scoring higher grades and mastering these essential associated skills. Some of these skills should be done with reading and comprehending content, sketching detailed book report outlines by extracting key points, the main body, etc. Also, you need to detect plagiarism accurately with the plagiarism checker free of charge.
The chief purpose of a book report is to make readers familiar with the book’s content in a brief and efficient manner (so that he/she can decide whether it is of any interest or use without having to read this book).
Book report outline completed for fictional works usually contain following elements:
Obviously, the format of a nonfiction book report outline would differ given that there are no characters or plots—in this case, ideas presented in each major section are described along with other elements listed above.
Acing this kind of assignment implies mastering all related sub-tasks, like
Students at various educational levels have various abilities, which suggests that assigned tasks should be adapted correspondingly:
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The college book report template provided below gives good sense of what content should be included in report, how outline should be completed. You can use this outline as a structure for your own report, or just read it for inspiration before completing your essay:
1. Introduction. Here, bibliography elements should be listed (author’s name, genre, publication date, publisher number of pages, etc.), main idea of the story (along with occasional lines for capturing reader’s attention).
Example: “The book “The Big Sleep” authored by Raymond Chandler and published in 1988 (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) belongs to the detective genre. It focuses on degrading morals of many representatives in society, as a side effect of capitalism/consumer culture.”
2. Summary. Here, one should list: setting, atmosphere, time of events, general plot (very brief), narrating perspective, but also main theme/argument.
“The narrative is set during the Depression, in the 1930’s in Los Angeles and Hollywood – at that time, a dark, rain-soaked, depraved, dangerous city jungle (an atmosphere portrayed in detail). Detective Philip Marlowe comes in contact with wealthy Sternwood family as part of his job. Here, he comes to know the Sternwood sisters and becomes involved in a series of events, which he investigates, revealing dark secrets they hide.”
3. Characters. One should outline here main characters as well as their pursuits/conflicts. Note that this section is only valid for fiction books.
The central characters are detective Philip Marlowe (the protagonist from whose perspective narration happens) and the Sternwood sisters: Vivian and Carmen. Marlowe is a fairly young gentleman, formal and polite, with high moral standards – he is a positive character (a moral gauge), always in his quest for truth. Vivian is the elder sister, very careful with her looks but with a rather vicious lifestyle (she becomes somewhat acquainted with Marlowe) and who is protective of Carmen. As for Carmen, she is an ill-mannered, ill-tempered, possessive, vengeful young lady – a truly negative character.
4. Plot. This section should contain the overall story, listing only major plot twists, conflict resolution, ending. Note that this section only applies to fiction books.
Example:
As the head of the Sternwood family invites Marlowe to find out more about a disappeared relative, he finds out more about this family getting to interact with both Vivian and Carmen. After a series of adventures, Marlowe discovers that it is Carmen who killed missing relative (for refusing her romantically), while Vivian covered up the crime. Carmen even tries to shoot Marlowe, but Marlowe anticipates this and takes appropriate action.
5. Evaluation with Conclusion. The last part of report outline. Mention here whether you found reading interesting or not and why, what you felt and learned from it, what its strong/weak aspects are, etc. Note that this part should be rather brief, unlike in reviews, where analysis rather than summarizing is key.
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As one can infer from above, writing reports are fairly time-consuming reading book itself takes longest and even challenging. If you are out of time for any reason, our professional team of writers at Edubirdie can pick up your task and submit high-quality outline.
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