How can a teacher check if students have read the book? They ask to write a book report. The assignment is an extended summary of the book. However, high school book reports are usually more complicated. They require you to evaluate the piece of writing, reflect on it, or answer some questions.
📒 High School Book Report: The Key Features
- A high school book report is a standard high school assignment. Unfortunately, it is not a real-world writing task because you will never write anything similar outside your school.
- There are three types of writing, depending on the book genre: nonfiction, biography, and fiction book reports.
- It is a combination of facts and your feelings about them.
- It is NOT a research paper, as it deals with one book individually, not a specific genre or author’s legacy. Neither should you dig into the author’s personality or lifeline.
- It is NOT a book review, as it does not compare the writing with other books. Moreover, you are not supposed to recommend it expressly to other people.
- It is NOT a critical essay because its purpose is not to evaluate but to report the key features (although you may include some evaluation).
🔰 High School Book Report Format
Summary
If you write a high school book report on a work of fiction, choose one of the following summarizing strategies:
- In an action summary, list the most critical events in their sequence. This approach is the simplest. You can choose the events that you consider the most important.
- To write a story pyramid, use the central plotline elements as a plan: exposition, rising action, climax, and falling action. You will require some knowledge of these literary elements.
To accelerate the writing of this section, you can use our Summarizer Tool. It will condense any lengthy text into a summary in a couple of seconds.
Theme and Character Analysis
A theme of a fictional book is its central topic or message. To know if you understood the theme correctly, check if it fits into one or two words: love, freedom, betrayal, social stereotypes, etc. A book can have several themes, but one is usually central. Highlight it, also mentioning the secondary themes.
A character analysis focuses on the principal traits of the main characters. Get the clues from what they say and do to other protagonists.
Tone & Setting
The tone of a book is the author’s feelings about something. Is it sarcastic, depressive, or optimistic? Try not to mix it with the mood, which means the book’s atmosphere.
To differentiate, here is the rule.
The tone equals how the author feels about the events. The mood equals how the reader feels about the same.
Time and place setting are the easiest things to define if you were attentive while reading the book. When did the events happen (a year or historical period), and where did they occur? Note that sometimes the time and setting can be fictional, i.e., not existing in reality.
Author & Publication Date
Specify the author’s full name and the book’s first publication date here. You can add the first publisher’s name.
Quotes
The best strategy in this section is to select the quotes supporting the central theme you specified above. They will explain and illustrate the author’s key message. If you need to add some indirect quotes to your text, you might want to use our paraphrase generator.
📑 High School Book Report Template
To illustrate the slightly tricky format described above, we have prepared a high school book report template in PDF format. Feel free to download it and use it as a reference.
✍️ Book Report Writing Tips
📖 High School Book Report Examples
Below you’ll find the links to a number of high school book report examples.
- “Comfort Women” by Nora Keller
- “Careless Lovers” by Edward Ravenscroft
- “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” by Richard Wright
- “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens
- “The Tale of Kieu” by Nguyen Du
- Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”
- ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift
- “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles
- “A Rose for Emily” Short Story by William Faulkner
- The Play “Hamlet” by Shakespeare
- “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath
We hope that with the help of this article, your book report will take much less time. If you have already written the text and would like to listen to how it sounds, use our Text-to-Speech tool. It is always easier to “hear” your mistakes being read by another person.
❓ High School Book Report: FAQ
How to Write a Nonfiction Book Report?
- Skip secondary details and irrelevant information.
- Write all the book’s ideas in your own words.
- Do not repeat yourself.
- Structure your report according to the chronological order or the order of importance.
- What would the author like you to remember after reading the book? It is exactly what you should include in the book report.
How to Write a Book Report on a Biography?
- Are you supposed to focus on the protagonist’s character traits or their life story? Choose either option, depending on the assignment.
- Divide the life of the protagonist into periods.
- Characterize each period and mention the critical events.
- Explain how the biography explains the actual person’s worldview and accurately depicts the past.
How to Write a Book Report Without Reading the Book?
- You’ll have to read the book’s beginning and end to get the central message.
- Flip through the pages in search of some quotes evidencing the idea.
- Keep your tone general, but include some specific details.
- Use a summarizing tool.
- Request academic assistance.
What are the 5 Parts of a Book Report?
Any book report should comprise:
- summary;
- theme and character analysis;
- tone, time, and setting;
- author’s full name and publication date;
- best quotes.
Some assignments will require you to make a deeper analysis of the text, but this is a compulsory minimum.