• What is a reading report?
• Steps to prepare a reading report
• How to make a reading report of The little Prince
• Other reading report examples

We explain what a reading report is and the steps to do it. An example of a report on The Little Prince and links to other examples.

A reading report includes information about the book as well as personal opinions.

What is a reading report?

A reading report or reading report is a type of school composition, consisting of a text expository and / or argumentative, which is written around the experience of reading of a specific book. It is one of the most common assignments in the contemporary educational process, generally in language, Spanish, English, and other similar subjects.

Broadly speaking, a reading report consists of an explanation - not necessarily a resume- of the content of the book, in which you can also explain which parts of it were the most interesting, which aspects were the most striking, what opinions it produced or even what we did not like so much and why.

This is not a task that has a single answer. Often the information concrete content of the book (such as its characters primary and secondary) is not as important as the thoughts who makes the report, since specific information can be obtained easily, without going through the experience of reading a complete book and formulating an opinion of your own.

This is because a reading report not only proposes to verify that we read the book, but also to test our ability to understand the work, interpret it or simply comment on it.

However, the specific information in the book must also be included. It is important to differentiate between:

• Storyteller. He is the one who tells the story.
• Characters. They are the ones who act in it, being primary and secondary.
• Plot. They are the events that occur.

It is also important to manage data Editorials of the work: what is its publisher, in what year it was published, who is its author and where and when he was born (and died, if applicable). This is the minimum information that cannot be missing from a reading report.

The reading reports are also the comments what professional readers do for publishing houses, in which they evaluate the content of a manuscript and recommend or not its publication.

Steps to prepare a reading report

The steps to prepare a reading report can be summarized as:

• Read the book in its entirety, ideally marking or writing down in a notebook the parts that we liked the most or that most caught our attention.
• Review the notes in the book, and think about why we liked what we wrote down or what things caught our attention about it. It's also helpful to think about what other books they remind us of, what thoughts inspired us, or if it has some kind of link to what we know about the author's life.
• In case we haven't already, it's always helpful to do a little research: did the book win any awards? At what time did it appear? How was the life of its author? What is usually said about the work?
• Finally, we must organize our ideas in a coherent text, going from the most general to the most specific. For this, it is possible to choose a single theme from those that appeared in the previous stages, or we can take a tour of the parts that we liked the most of the work, explaining why, or we can even say what we did not think so good , and because. It is essential to argue these types of opinions.
• Reading reports do not usually have introduction neither conclusions, or at least not formally, but we may well allocate an opening paragraph to introduce the work (who wrote it, when, in what context) and a final paragraph to offer a conclusion (our opinion of the work, for example).

How to make a reading report of The little Prince

As an example, we will review how a short novel reading report could be made The little Prince by the French author and also aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), guiding us through the steps detailed above.

• The first indispensable step would be to read The little Prince. Is a novel brief, and is usually accompanied by beautiful illustrations by the author, so it is not difficult to take some notes while we read it, even if it is to mark the chapters that most excited us, or at least ask ourselves what characters They are the ones we liked the most. Suppose that in this case we choose to speak of the fox.
• The fox appears in several of the chapters of the final part of The little Prince, when just the little prince steps on the Earth. So we can ask ourselves: What interested us the most about that episode? Which of the phrases said by the fox, for example, did we like the most? What other episode in the book did the arrival of the fox remind us of, either by similarity or difference? Did we notice any special features in the way of writing this episode? And the rest of the book?
• Once we have taken the notes and even the verbatim quotes from the episode of the fox and any other that interests us, we can begin to organize our ideas. A first introductory paragraph is always a good idea, telling about the interesting life de Saint-Exupéry and when he wrote his work, especially if what was said has something to do with the theme of the fox, which will be our central theme of the report.
• Once the introductory paragraph is written, we will find a way to go straight to talking about the fox episode. How to do it? We can list the characters that appear and then say that the fox was the most interesting to us and why, or we can go straight to the point and explain that, of the entire book, the fox episodes seemed the most beautiful, or the most philosophically important, or perhaps the most difficult to understand. The important thing is that, whatever we say, we always explain why, and if possible we give examples of it (we will use the verbatim quotes there).
• Finally, after talking about the book in general and the episode of the fox in particular, we will be able to elaborate the closing paragraph or conclusions, where we will take up what was said a bit and round off our reading of The little Prince. Here we will say what the work seemed to us in general, we will say with what other works we related it or what we learned after reading it, or even after finding out about the author and seeing ourselves in the obligation to think about the connections between his life and the novel. Everything is valid, as long as we can explain our feelings to the reader and that we proceed one step at a time, in a coherent and cohesive way.

Other reading report examples

Below we offer other reading reports to serve as an example, but not before reminding you that plagiarism is always easy to verify and that you miss a lot if you do not read the work and if you do not allow yourself to think about what it made you feel and think , whatever it is.

• Reading report of the story "The feather pillow" by Horacio Quiroga.
• Reading report of the book "El mundo de Sofía" by Jostein Gaardner.
• Reading report of the book "The psychoanalyst" by John Katzenbach.