Pieces on Speculative Fiction

I came across very interesting post about how most blog exclusive reviewers want to be published in print venues. Jay Tomio asserts that online sources of opinion aren’t poorer shadows of print opinions. I agree with him on the principle, however, I’d have to argue that people who write for print media have better understanding of their venue. I refer to the factoid that many web writers actually have no understanding how to write for the web. Most reviews in the blogosphere are written using traditional pyramid model where conclusions are therefore at the bottom of the article. This is the reason why I rarely read online reviews.

A quick points to improve readability of reviews:

• Grade on the top of the review, if you give one
• Opinion first, reasons and basic stuff later.
• Use emphasis
• Use inverted pyramid

You don’t even need to adhere to everything, just remember to put most important points first. Remember that most people scan online so you should write your posts to facilitate that. There is no need to copy the style of reviews from print medium, because it is far from optimal online. If there is a grand theme or point in the book you want to discuss in length, you can write another post discussing it and then link to it from the review.

When I look for reviews of a book I try to find out whether I should read it or not. Because a lot of online reviews are written tediously and I don’t have many favorite reviewers I quickly check as many reviews I can access fast and for the opinion based on the aggregate of conclusions.

The a main reason why Amazon reviews are useful is the rating system. Compared to them for example Sfsite reviews aren’t so hot when trying to quickly decide whether to buy a book or not. Hunting for the reviewers opinion from big blocks of text make SFsite reviews less useful. Amazons huge bulk of reviews makes up for the fact the most of them are crappy, the ratings convey enough information. SFsite reviews do have value to me, but that is mostly for comparing my opinion about a book to someone else’s.

Lastly, please link with phrases describing the content of the target, no more “More information available HERE”.

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Tags blog meta, writing reviews

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 12:34 am by Illotus . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.