Should I . . . ?

(Review)

Should I go see that movie? Should I buy that app? Should I listen to this album or go to that concert? Should I read this book, check out that museum, or eat in that new restaurant over there?

Decisions, decisions everywhere. Important decisions. Your audience needs help in making one of these decisions.

Your audience wants to know if something (music, movie, book, TV show, app, clothing, food, restaurant, concert, play, video game, etc.) is any good. They have come to you for your opinion, which they will rely upon to make their decision.

AUDIENCE

Your audience is someone your age, in roughly your circumstances, who has had similar experiences. It’s not you but people similar to you—your peers.

PURPOSE

You are helping the audience make the right decision for themselves, which makes for an interesting challenge. On the one hand, you’re going to need to be opinionated. On the other hand, you’re going to also have to be informative and persuasive, telling them what they need to know about your subject to make a decision for themselves, while also arguing your point of view about your experience with your subject.

PROCESS

1. Choose your subject.

Pick something you’ve never experienced specifically but with which you’re at least a little bit familiar. You shouldn’t choose a horror movie if you’ve never seen a horror movie, for example. A good subject intersects with your own experience and enthusiasms, but it’s important that you haven’t yet experienced the specific subject itself. You want to be able to record your impressions as someone coming to it for the first time, the same way your audience will ultimately be experiencing it.

2. Find models.

Find examples of solutions to this writing-related problem. This should not be difficult. You encounter them all the time.

3. Study the models.

What kinds of information and background do your models share? How are they structured? Where is the author present in the piece of writing? On what criteria is the subject judged? How do the examples help the audience in making their decision?

4. Experience your subject.

Make sure to take good notes on your experience for use as you write your piece. Consider whether your subject should be experienced only once prior to writing or if it’s the kind of subject that is best experienced multiple times prior to writing.

What are the differences in these kinds of subjects? How does this make for a different piece? What role does the audience for your piece have in these choices?

5. Analyze audience.

Be particularly thoughtful in considering the dimensions of your audience’s knowledge. What do they know about your subject? What might they need to know, in your review, and when will they need to know it? When should you avoid going overboard in sharing information? (Spoiler alert! Movies.)

6. Draft.

Do your thing. It’s your process. Just remember your audience and purpose.

7. Test draft.

Ideally, exchange your draft with someone else engaged in a similar experience (though writing on a different specific subject). If you don’t have a test audience, you can look at your own draft and ask yourself the following questions.

After reading the review, answer the following questions without referring back to the review.

8. Revise.

Revise your review, attempting to meet any missing audience needs.

9. Edit and polish.

When sharing your opinions, making sure there’s no obvious reason to dismiss those opinions may be useful in engaging our audience.

Read the review out loud, slowly. See if you catch mistakes you didn’t see before.

REFLECT

Which part of the writing process was most time consuming? Why do you think that is?

Have you ever written a formal review before? How much time was spent figuring out the ins and outs of what a review does and how it does it?

One of the best aspects of expanding your writing experiences is that once you’ve done something previously unfamiliar a few times, the “moves” start to become subconscious. The cognitive load—what you have to be thinking about as you’re writing—drops as your familiarity increases.

If at the beginning a new form feels like ill-fitting clothes, that’s to be expected. It’s a normal part of building the writer’s practice.

REMIX

Now repurpose your review for another medium. It can be video, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever else you can think of.

What changes do you need to make to your review to suit this switch in medium? Why must you make those changes?

ALTERNATE REMIX

Find a review of your subject that disagrees with you. If it’s someplace that allows comments, start an argument. Your goal is to win the audience over to your opinion with the superiority of your insights and evidence. What will be most persuasive for the people you’re trying to convince?

READING LIKE A WRITER

One of the skills writers frequently use is “reading like a writer.” This skill was employed during the last experience when you were asked to study the model reviews.

Usually, we spend most of our time reading for meaning, taking in and assessing the ideas presented in a piece of writing. We ask, “What is this saying?”

Reading like a writer changes the question from what to how, as in, “How does this say what it says?”

Reading like a writer involves asking questions of the piece of writing in order to understand what it’s trying to do and how it’s trying to do it.

What is it? (Genre)

Why did they write it? (Purpose)

Who wrote this? (Author’s style, tone, persona)

Who is it written for? (Audience)

What is it saying? (Message)

These are the elements of the rhetorical situation. Being able to analyze the rhetorical situation of a particular text is a core skill for any reader and writer.

GENRE

“Genre” is a term we use to categorize a type of expression within a medium. Film is a medium, and romantic comedy is a genre. Music is a medium, and hip hop and jazz are genres.

A genre is defined by its characteristics: form, style, subject matter, purpose. A romantic comedy is recognized by its story—two people negotiating the difficulties of a relationship—as well as its tone and even its structure. Ninety-nine percent of romantic-comedy films share the same basic plot: couple meets, couple hates each other, couple falls in love, couple breaks up, couple gets back together.

Also, there is a montage where someone tries on hats.

Writing can be categorized by genre. Novels can be mysteries or romances or science fiction. You can tell the difference between a recipe and a poem by their structure and purposes.

The word “essay” could be used to describe a genre, but for our purposes we should consider it far too general to be helpful. There are many different types of essays. The word shares its origin with “assay,” which means “to test the quality of.” “Essay” itself means “to try.” An essay is an attempt at something, an exploration. To know what kind of essay is being written requires deeper knowledge of why we’re writing and who we’re writing to.

While we want to think about genre, we don’t want to fall into the trap of mistaking the general for the specific. By itself, “essay” doesn’t reveal much about the specifics of a genre.

As we think about genre in our writing problems, we want to understand the specifications in order to name the category, rather than determining the category and writing to those specifications.

This is what you were asked to do with the “Should I . . . ?” assignment: to understand the characteristics that make up a particular type of writing. A review is a genre, though within the genre there’s lots of room for variety, and what is being reviewed plays a significant role in that variety.

No one worries about putting spoilers in a review of a blender.

Genre doesn’t tell us everything we need to know, but it’s a good place to start.

And in some cases, it won’t really matter if we can identify the specific genre, as long as we know how it’s working and what we’re trying to accomplish as we engage our audience.

PURPOSE

This is the “why” of writing.

Are you aiming to inform, instruct, persuade, entertain, challenge, inspire, or some combination of the above?

Without purpose, we can’t begin to make informed choices about what to say or how to say it.

For example, a good review should be informative, entertaining, and persuasive all at the same time. Figuring out how to balance those purposes is a significant part of the challenge.

Every piece of writing has a purpose. Understanding the purpose and how that purpose is fulfilled is part of reading like a writer.

AUTHOR

In this context, we think of the author as the “unique intelligence” who created the piece of writing.

The unique intelligence is expressed through a persona, the character we perceive through the writing. In some cases, the author’s persona can seem almost entirely absent. In others, it is so close that it seems to be inside our heads.

Persona can be highly formal, as in a research study, or far more informal, as in a piece of writing that puts the author’s experience front and center. You may have been given many “rules” to follow in your writing, like never use “I” or contractions. Rather than seeing these as rules that apply to all writing, think of them as shortcuts to achieving an academic persona.

If you don’t use “I” in the “Should I . . . ?” assignment, the review starts to sound really odd.

Persona and tone are choices governed by genre, purpose, and audience. There are no hard-and-fast rules. Determining the guidelines for a particular rhetorical situation is part of reading like a writer.

AUDIENCE

The audience is the group you’re writing to or for. Different audiences may demand different approaches. For example, a lecture on the solar system would be very different for an audience of astrophysicists versus an audience of third graders.

When we consider audience, we think of them in three dimensions: their needs, their attitudes, and their knowledge.

Needs: What does your audience need from your piece of writing? Essentially, what is the writing being used for?

How do purpose and audience intersect? To fulfill your purpose, how must you think about your audience’s needs?

How are they going to read? Quickly? Multiple times? As slowly and closely as humanly possible?

And to fulfill your audience’s needs, what choices do you have to make in terms of things like structure or sourcing or language?

A review is designed to help an audience make a decision for themselves. It needs to be designed to fulfill those needs.

Attitudes: What attitudes do audiences bring to your writing? Are they hostile? Excited? Wary? Are they interested in your subject or indifferent to it?

Knowing what your audience is bringing to the experience helps you better tailor the experience to their needs. Imagine writing a review about a movie by a director whose last movie flopped. If your audience knows this, they may bring a particular preconceived attitude about the movie you’re reviewing. You may be able to use that attitude as a point of comparison (“another turkey from . . .”) or contrast (“a triumphant return to form for . . . “).

Knowledge: What does your audience know, or think they know, about your subject or you prior to reading your writing?

Do they have any mistaken impressions that you’ll need to correct? Are there things they know that you can build upon to connect with them and enhance your message?

What do you have to include because you need them to know it? What can you exclude because they know it already?

Many of the experiences will include additional, specific insights into your audience’s needs, attitudes, and knowledge, but for each experience, you will be required to make choices consistent with those elements.

MESSAGE

This is simply what you have to say combined with how you say it.

As you’re already intuiting, this is clearly dependent on the other aspects of the rhetorical situation (purpose, author, audience, genre).

For example, you may want to be persuasive on a particular topic (purpose), but how to be persuasive on that topic (message) may change significantly based on different audiences. Even as you tackle the same purpose, what may be motivating for one group may be off-putting to another. Calibrating your message to your audience and purpose is both difficult and necessary. The constraints of genre may also significantly impact your message. Imagine the difference between trying to persuade in a five-thousand-word piece of writing versus a 240-character tweet.

Remember, your writing is yours. Your name is on the top, and what you have to say should reflect what you believe.

Always.