A Guide to Mastering the Fair, Balanced— and Believable—online Review. Trust Us!!!!
So, you’re a critic! Congratulations.
Come on, don’t be modest. The sooner you admit it, the better for everyone. If you have used Amazon, Trip Advisor, OpenTable , Facebook, or some other venue to weigh in on goods or services, you have written criticism.
If none of those outlets has incubated the next Pauline Kael, this has less to do with the subject matter than with the way it’s handled: the operatic anger. The orgiastic praise. The pointless anecdotes, the personal details, the irrelevant data. And, if the site is Yelp!, the exclamation points, OMG, the exclamation points!!!!!!!!
Some of the flaws that make online reviews so deeply irritating or useless come from attempts to conform to a house style. Others could be avoided if the reviewer would just stop and ask, before writing a word, what it is he or she is trying to accomplish.
I’ve written a restaurant review almost every week for the New York Times since the start of 2012, and I still have to ask myself the same question each time I sit down at my laptop: What am I trying to do here? Am I bragging about how great my last meal was, or helping somebody else plan his next one? Steering innocent readers away from some gastronomic tar pit, or showing off my own wit?
This story is from the November 2016 edition of Town & Country.
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This story is from the November 2016 edition of Town & Country.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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