Well it's how I do it!!! (Writing a Good dooyoo Review)

Member Name: sandemp

Product:	Writing a Good dooyoo Review
Date:	03/08/09 (155 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Seems to work for me

Disadvantages: Might not for you

Having spent a few years away from the site I thought that I'd lost the Dooyoo bug, but once more I find myself regularly writing reviews about all my favourite and most loathed products. Once more I'm struggling to find the balance between information and opinion and now I'm going to share my opinion of how I try to write 'good' reviews.

The first thing I do is make sure that I've really had experience of using whatever it is that I'm going to review. I recently got a new mobile phone, but I refused to even put finger to keyboard until I'd used it for over a month. I don't think a day or even a week is long enough to have found any niggles in a product like this, in fact the longer you've owned and used something like a phone, computer, DVD player or the such before reviewing them the better. It's the same with a shop, I wouldn't think of writing a review on a shop that's just opened near me, for the simple reason that I've only ever been through the doors once, didn't even buy anything and was so unimpressed that I'm unlikely to go back. I could write a scathing review, but I wouldn't be covering half of the shopping experience, and there wouldn't be any balance.

Next I check the database to see if what I want to review is listed, it doesn't matter how good a review is, if it's in the wrong place then it's simply not useful and a close match isn't good enough, if a review of an off-line shop is placed in the on-line category then it's only going to cover part of the topic and hold information and opinion on something other than it should. It's easy enough to add a new suggestion and it's only taking about a week for those I've suggested to appear on the site which gives plenty of time for writing and checking your review.

When it comes to writing a review, my first big tip is to open up your word processor, it's so much easier to write a good review in one of these. For a start there's no worrying about accidentally closing the page and losing all your work. It also gives you a chance to spell check and save to read through later, before posting. With the spell check function in a word processor there is no excuse for bad spelling, mine isn't perfect, I regularly need the spell checker, and I also use the thesaurus function on mine for when I'm stuck on which word I want to use.

And onto the review itself. Everybody has a different style when writing their reviews and my style changes depending on what I'm reviewing. I try to make most of my reviews fairly short, between about 500 and 1000 words, but there are some products that have so many different elements and functions that they take far more words. What I do try and do is put in everything I would have liked to know before I bought the product or used the service. I know this means I won't have necessarily covered everything that you would have wanted to know, but I think this would make a review way too long. I don't think that lists of ingredients are at all helpful, what is, is when you have something to say about a particular ingredient. Let's make this perfectly clear, I do not review food stuffs, for the simple reason that I couldn't find the words to adequately describe taste and sensations.

Similarly I don't do actual film reviews, these are incredibly difficult in my opinion. But I know what I look for in them. It's a very bad idea to give away more of the plot than you'd find on the back of the case, I don't like character descriptions. It kind of spoils things when somebody gives a huge analysis of each character. There's other things you can give your opinion on, the quality of acting, special effects, score, whether the plotline was believable. It's not necessary and to me less than helpful to add lots of information about the background to the making of the film. Sure tell me that it's someone's debut performance but listing every film they've been in is padding and makes it harder to find the useful part of the review. The same goes with books, the best book reviews tell me virtually nothing about the plot or characters, but still manage to give tonnes of opinion, which helps me to decide whether to read it or not. When it comes to DVDs, lists of special features aren't useful, opinion on whether they are any good or not is. In fact with every product, lists of features are just not useful, they can be found anywhere, what is useful is putting those features into context. For example, a mobile phone may have an advertised battery talk-time, but this is in laboratory conditions, so what would be useful would be for you to tell us what you found the talk time to be like for you, with the way you use the phone.

It's tempting to go online and find lots of extra information about the product that you're reviewing and then add that information to your review to make it longer. But does this make a review more helpful? Well I think not, in most cases it makes the review less helpful. Is giving the history of a shop going to help someone decide whether to use it, probably not. That's not to say all background information is a bad thing, if a company or manufacturer has a particularly ethical or unethical past, then this is something that's worth knowing, but the fact it opened 12 years ago wouldn't really effect whether I was going to shop there. What would effect my decision is what the prices are like, how helpful the staff are, what customer service is like and even whether there are usually enough trollies and baskets, all these sorts of things regularly get forgotten but would help me decide whether to use the shop or not.

It's also a good idea to get a little balance in your review, even if you hated (or loved the product) is there anything you can think of that is good (or bad) about it? I do know, from experience, that there are some things where you just can't think of anything good to say, but I always try. And it doesn't matter how good something is, nothing is perfect, there's always something that niggles, no matter how small. It's also nice to finish off the review with a conclusion, stating if you're recommending the product or not and why. Just a few sentences, to summarise and round things off, a lot of people want to know the price and this is as good a place as anywhere to tell us how much you paid. But I'm not even sure this is strictly necessary, seeing as prices change regularly, but if you got a particular bargain then it can be useful to tell us that while you thought it was worth the money at that price, it wouldn't be at the normal price.

So that's the review all written, now it's time to spell check, format and read through. I try to make my reviews as easy to read as possible. No matter what the length, I break the reviews into paragraphs, each of which focuses on a particular aspect. Occasionally I'll use headings, mainly while I'm reviewing something that has a lot of different aspects. More than anything this helps me organise myself and cover everything that I want to, but it also helps the reader find the particular information they're looking for. Shorter reviews don't need headings, and there's nothing worse (for me at least) than a short review broken up into headings, each of which is covered by a single sentence. It's much easier on the eye if the review is written in sensible paragraphs interspersed with blank lines. No matter what format I use, my next step is always to read through what I've written and make any little changes I feel necessary and then I save the file and close it off. I'll then re-read it the next day, and I always find little changes I can make to make it easier to understand, or realise that I've forgotten a particular aspect or decide there's something in there that's not necessarily all that useful. And after all this I'll finally post the review, reading through it yet again at the preview stage and making any adjustments necessary. Has anyone else noticed that blank lines seem to mysteriously disappear when posting a review? Finally I have a hopefully, half-decent review on the site, that I check through once more before finally leaving it be.

There you go, my attempt at helping you write something that will at least be useful just remember these points and the fact that with all reviews on this site this is my opinion on what I think is needed in writing a good review.

Do: Have experience of using the product or service you're reviewing and the write the review in a word processor using a reasonably good level of English, the spell checker helps make sure you've spelt everything correctly. Share as much experience of using the product as possible and make sure any information (ingredients, functions etc) given is in context to your experiences.

Don't : Write a review after only using a product the once, write your review in the 'write review' box on the site, pad your review out with lists and random facts you've found on the internet or give away any plot spoilers in film, book or game reviews.

And finally do have fun don't make writing reviews a chore and don't take any ratings received personally.

Summary: How I go about this business of writing reviews.