How Not To Write User Reviews

Here is yet another guide on writing, this time focusing on user reviews. I will focus on some of the mistakes that I saw on various sites, and how best to avoid them.

Making Your Review Too Short

I went into this in more detail in a previous entry. Essentially, while reviews should be concise, reviews that are too short fail to express anything. Reviewers may not get bored reading short reviews, but that doesn't help if they don't learn anything.

Making Your Review Too Long

This is as much of a problem as making reviews too short, but not entirely for the reasons you would think.

While some sites have generous word count limitations, that doesn't mean you should necessarily post an extremely long review. Not everyone has the patience to read it, especially not when there might be dozens of other reviews. Long reviews often tend to ramble or go off on tangents, both of which sould be avoided.

TV Tropes has a strange quirk in that while it has a word limit of 3,000 characters, the limit is never enforced at the time of a review's initial submission. As a result, people who know this can get away with submitting reviews that are sometimes twice as long as the word count limit.

So why am I telling you how to flout the rules? First, I do so in the hopes that by calling attention to this problem, it will one day be rectified. Second, even if you get away with violating the word limit now, that only applies to the initial submission. If you submit a 6,000 character review, then go back to edit it, you'll have to take off half the review before it accepts your changes. Perhaps this isn't a problem for those who don't care about writing good reviews, but it can be an unwelcome surprise to those who assumed that their review was within the word count limit, and wanted to go back to fix something.

Speaking of TV Tropes, other reviewers try to get around the word limit for a review by posting as much of the review as they can fit into the word count limit into the main body of the review, then posting the rest into a comment. Since there's no specific limit to how long comments can be, this is technically allowed, but violates the rule against  multi-part reviews.

In a nutshell, just because you can make a review long doesn't mean you should.

Making Errors With Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation, Formatting and Other Things

This is relatively obvious, but I feel that it's worth repeating. Mistakes can happen but if you don't do your utmost to make your review as good as it can be, people may not take it seriously.

Of course, the severity and frequency of the errors are also a factor. Most people will forgive a simple typo, or two words accidentally fused together, but when a significant portion of the words are misspelled, people may come to the conclusion that you're not fluent in the language you're using, or not very smart.

Another problem that should be avoided is writing in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. It's generally viewed as the least professional way to emphasize what you're saying, and generally, bold and italics work better. Of course, both of those should be used sparingly, to avoid diminishing their effect through overuse.

Like with some of the mistakes I describe, there's nothing stopping you from being sloppy when it comes to proofreading, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. As always, writing your review as well as you can is your responsibility.

Using Bullet Point Lists

Imagine if this blog post was reduced to the bolded headings, with none of the text accompanying each one. You'd likely get a good sense for the things I want people to avoid in their user reviews, but not why I want them to avoid doing those things. As such, people who don't already agree with me or trust me enough to take my word for it would not be likely to do as I say.

Bullet points tend to be popular among inexperienced writer, who use them as a crutch to avoid having to properly format paragraphs. After all, why bother making each paragraph about a specific point and each sentence a piece of evidence in support of that point when you can simply make a list of what you liked or disliked about the work?

The answer is because if you go the latter route, then people are less likely to believe what you're saying. For example, it's hard to believe that a bullet point describing a certain character as annoying unless you provide examples why. Going into depth may be difficult if your word count is limited, but as always, you need to choose the most relevant points to include in your review, and make them as concisely as you can. Both of these decisions require writing experience to make well, but if you can do so, the end result will be much better than a simple list of the work's strengths and shortcomings.

Assuming Readers Have Viewed The Work Being Reviewed

So, I mostly liked Code Geass, but I thought that the Euphinator incident was a bit too much of a Diabolus Ex Machina for my liking, saw Nina as The Scrappy ever since "Table-kun" and thought that Zero Requiem was full of Fridge Logic.

Viewers who watched Code Geass probably understand that sentence, and likely have an opinion as to whether it's true. Those who did not, however, will find themselves thoroughly lost, even if they're well-versed in TV Tropes lingo. Unfortunately, since the latter group is the one more likely to read the review- and decide whether Code Geass is worth watching- a review written like this fails to be of any use to them.

There are a few reasons why people post reviews that aren't written for the uninitiated. One reason is that most commenters who share their opinion on the review have already viewed the work in question, so the reviewers in question might assume that such people are the only ones who read those reviews. Another reason is that those reviewers are writing to express their opinion rather than help give advice to people considering the work. It's all well and good to write just to express your opinion, as I often do, but it's most helpful to also consider the uninitiated when you write.

Posting Spoilers

As I said in the previous section, reviews should be written for the uninitiated, and those people generally don't want the plot spoiled for them, unless:

1. The event in question happens early on in the series, and helps establish the premise. For example, in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, Jaime Lannister pushes Bran Stark out of a high window for witnessing him having sex with his sister, Queen Cersei Lannister, a shocking event that sets the plot into motion.
2. The event is fairly well-known. The aforementioned death of Ned Stark, the apparent protagonist of the series, near the end of the first book/season not only helps result in a continent-spanning civil war, but shows that the series is not afraid to kill off main characters.
3. The event in question is a spoiler, but is noteworthy enough to discuss. In this case, Daenerys Targaryen's actions in the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones were controversial enough that some reviews mentioned them, albeit warning readers about the review containing spoilers.

There are times when you may need to spoil the plot in order to properly evaluate a work, but in those cases, due diligence should be practiced. What follows is a list of steps you should take.

1. Decide whether the detail is important enough to share. If spoiling a plot twist is necessary to make a certain point about the work, but said point is not fully necessary, then you can leave it out of your review.
2. Avoid directly mentioning details that could spoil the plot if it's possible to find a workaround. For example, if you want to warn the viewers about sexually explicit content, you could mention that a brother and sister are shown having sex, without mentioning the significance- the fact that Jaime is the father of Joffrey and his siblings, not King Robert Baratheon, means that Cersei's children do not have valid claim to the throne, making Robert's brother Stannis the rightful king.
3. Decide whether to provide spoiler warnings and/or spoiler tags. In the case of the conclusion to Daenerys' character arc, it's impossible to talk about that without mentioning the last two episodes, but it's important to mention that a piece about those will spoil the end of the series

If you believe that revealing a certain tidbit about the work will not spoil the plot, then go ahead and put it in your review. When in doubt, however, remember that your readers are those who have not yet decided whether to get started with the series in question, and write your review so as not to spoil it for them.

Not Reviewing The Work

Naturally, this is rather obvious. Any piece of writing that does not fulfill the purpose it sets out to do has no real worth. That said, I will share a few examples of this sort of thing on TV Tropes, all of which have since been deleted.

• A "review" of Persona 3 that evaluated all the party members from a gameplay perspective, apparently due to the author disliking every single one of them. For example, the author doesn't discuss Shinjiro's character arc, but how he's one of the few sources of Strike damage in the game, something that means nothing to those unfamiliar with the battle system.
• A review in Vietnamese that talked about something relating to Amazon.com. I forget which work it is, but it doesn't matter, since it wasn't even tangentially relevant to the work in question.
• Yet another review posted links to Russian tourism-related articles. Once again, it was entirely irrelevant to the work it was supposedly reviewing.

As you can imagine, these types of non-reviews should be avoided. TV Tropes is relatively lax when it comes to deleting reviews that violate the rules, but moderators usually swiftly delete reviews like these. If you want your review to be read, much less taken seriously, you'll need to at least fulfill the intended purpose by providing an evaluation of the work in question.

Conclusion

These are only a few of the ways a review can go wrong, but I hope this was helpful. Reviewing is largely a matter of knowing your subject, writing well and exercising common sense, so as long as you practice those, you should at least be able to produce a review of acceptable quality.