Every chapter in the book How to Read Literature like a Professor is full of insightful knowledge about how to further understand the text one is reading. All of the insights that were presented in the book can be applied to any story and this was shown with the example text at the end of this book. The short story The Garden Party was a seemingly simple story about an upper class family having an elegant party when they learned a lower class man was just killed a short distance from their home in the lower class neighborhood next to their home.

Before I read this book I would have overlooked the numerous symbols and intentions of the author Katherine Mansfield. The first time that I read the short story I did not pick up on the symbolism of flight between the girls and the lower class. However, the book explain this symbolism to me and also taught me how to read more carefully in future works for symbolism. Despite the fact that I did not pick up on the symbolism of flight, I still read this work with much more knowledge of why the author made the weather perfect and the scenery of the garden so beautiful but made the lower class village such a dark and smoky place. Putting this short story at the end of this novel really showed me how to immediately apply the techniques of reading that I learned from How to Read Literature like a Professor.

The writing style of Thomas C. Foster in How to Read Literature like a Professor is quite different that those of the other authors I have read in the past. Foster presents the information in this novel in a style that is casual and passionate. For example, when he is writing about how authors use weather to depict a certain mood in their work the reader feels like he is holding a causal conversation with Foster rather than reading a bland paper on why rain causes a somber.

I really enjoy this style of writing and find that it makes reading the novel go by very quickly. Also, I think that this style of writing is a good approach to presenting the information given in How to Read Literature like a Professor because it is easy to write about certain topics in this book in a boring fashion. An example of this is when Foster is talking about how most literature pieces can be related back to the topics, themes and characters of Shakespeare's works. He finds interesting connections between Shakespeare and other works and writes about how "if you're reading a work and something sounds too good to be true you know where it is from". In my opinion, Foster's approach and writing style of this novel cause it to be a very enjoyable and causal read with valuable information.