Formal Reviewing 101 · 3:26am Nov 19th, 2014
Readers require no credentials. Authors who write as though they have no credentials are quickly pointed to a number of handy resources where such credentials may be obtained. But for the reviewer there is very little. The bad ones are flamed into indignity, ignored, or in the worst case only review privately where there is no one to save their victims' stories from death by advice. "Good" reviewers are all too often the ones we agree with or have such a following it is not worth the fracas to state otherwise.
"So what?" asks the straw-thor. People will have opinions no matter what, and rats unquestionably race the rat race. But I beg the question: who is writing those author advice materials? Who shapes how an audience will perceive not just a particular story, but stories in general? When we question "how do I make my story better", whose opinions to we take as our source of perfection, or at the very least more perfect than whatever tripe is mucking around our word processor? Scared yet? I know I am. Therefore, I feel compelled to offer up the following handbook for better exercising the universal responsibilities of reviewing for an audience:
What is a reviewer?
The job of a reviewer is ultimately to be that individual who went in first, survived, and is now here to tell the tale. If you read a story and survived, you are in a position to be a reviewer. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Though anyone might leave a comment on a story, we certainly do not refer to everyone who comments as a reviewer. This is because going in first carries with it responsibility. We have not read the story yet, so we have only the word of the reviewer to shape our first impressions or even help us decide whether we will pick it up at all. You are not a formal reviewer until you make the choice to shoulder the responsibility towards your readers, the author of the story chief amongst them.
At its core, this means you recognize that you are speaking for the benefit of an audience. You are a public voice regardless of how many views your blog actually receives. While this does not necessarily entail keeping your nose squeaky clean or hiring a PR consultant, it does mean you must recognize that when you speak, someone might take you seriously. You must speak as though your words have power.
Now, who do your words have power over? The author of what you are reviewing is one. On fimfic especially, it is very difficult to find detailed criticism of any kind, let alone quality criticism. To write a reasonably structured paragraph with a conclusion on a relatively unknown story may be the only feedback that author will ever receive. When you have only one opinion to consider, that opinion will loom large regardless of how sound it may be. It could inspire a rewrite, a change in course, or perhaps even abandoning a story altogether. A reviewer must always be mindful that these dire consequences are always in play.
The other stakeholders in your reviews are your general readership. These are the people who read your posts frequently and might even drop you comments from time to time. If you give a story props, they will consider reading it moreso than before. If you trash a story beyond repair, not only will they stay away, but they will likely tell their friends to keep off as well. In the worst case, mobs happen. But more subtle than this, they will start to pick up on your habits and standards for judging quality and begin to apply them for themselves. In this way, a reviewer shapes not only public perception of a story, but the readership's perception of stories in general. This begs a reviewer to reflect on the hows and whys of their reviewing process and keep their head on straight. If you say it, someone may believe it. If you say it enough times, even you will believe it.
A formal reviewer serves their audience
Of course, all of this assumes that people are listening to you. But why would they do that? One cannot simply spout off their opinion and magically get views. People give their attention to reviewers they find useful. This could be for entertainment value. This could be because your opinions are in sync. It might even be specifically because you are diametrically opposed. Whatever the reason, a reviewer must base their entire reviewing career on this simple premise: it is your job to find out what your audience wants to know and communicate this information to them in the easiest way for them to digest. Even a Rage Reviewer must stick to this principle: the audience demands to know how bad could a story get, and they find the stories perused are best endured with fire and tears.
And so the starting reviewer must ask themself: what audience do I want to serve? What do they want to know and why? How can I consistently find the answers to their questions? How would they most enjoy me communicating these conclusions to them? At the end of the day, reviewing is not about hanging arbitrary numbers on media. Reviewing is leaving your reader walking away each and every week with a little something more than they started with.
Concerning numbers
I bring up numbers in particular because they are at once the most widespread conception of what a review is and the least useful form of review. If I put a sticker on your story that said "4/5", what exactly does this mean? Assuming we can assume it is a rating in which bigger numbers on the left is better and the left number shall not exceed the right one (not always the case), we might conclude that whatever this story is, it is preferable over a 3/5 and less preferable than a 5/5, should we happen across them.
But what do we actually end up knowing about the story? Nothing. We do not know the genre, nor what gave it those 4 units of goodness, nor what kept it from getting a 5th unit of goodness. We do not even know what these units of goodness entail or whether the method for assigning them matches up with how we might do it. Suppose someone else slaps a 3/5 on the story. Who is right? What are they even saying? Suppose the first rater is loose and rates many stories a 4/5 or better while the latter is strict and rarely rates above a 2/5? Certainly we could average them to a 3.5/5, but we are still no closer to answering any of the above questions (plus we are mixing fractions with the decimals, and that's terrible 
)
A reviewer speaking for the good of their audience speaks in complete sentences. Not numbers. Then they summarize with a quick interpretation that will be meaningful to the intended reader of the review. Suppose our audience is picky about the spelling and grammar. We might devote a short paragraph to note the author had trouble with their end of dialog punctuation and missed a comma here and there, but at least they were consistently off. Errors present, but mostly harmless. If we have done our job right, the reader can judge for themself whether they will be irked from our examination.
Of course, there are some who believe numbers are ipso facto objective, but this is confusing form with function. In the hard sciences, yes, numbers can be shown to correspond with observation and there are mathematical formulas for reliably converting carefully gathered quantitative observations into solid conclusions. However, literature is not a hard science. Our observations are qualitative, not quantitative, and there is no known consistent, reliable, way to transform these observations into meaningful numbers. If the only way for the reader to figure out what the numbers mean is to read the full review, then clearly they are not adding any additional information by being there.
If you are still dead set on making statements of relative order, consider replacing your numbers with what the appropriate interpretation of those numbers is in that category for your average reader. Instead of rating a story 4/5 for grammar, consider a "noticeable but harmless" category, which is somewhere between "immaculate" and "tolerable". In this way, your readers do not need to gusstimate an interpretation of your conclusions and as a bonus they have something concrete to spark discussion in the comments section rather than ratings flame wars.
Be a knowable person
All that aside, there is one thing going for a properly described numerical scale: consistency. A reviewer is someone that people put their trust in. There is no more difficult person to trust than someone who changes at the drop of a hat. Furthermore, a great deal of our communication relies on context. A snide remark in a rage review is par for the course, but venom in one of my Twilight's Library rejections would likely cause a stir, as it goes against the general demeanor I try to maintain. The more clues and explicit understandings you can give your reader by which to interpret what you say, and the more effort you put forth to stick to that understanding, the better off you will be.
This starts with tone. As mentioned before, just because you are a formal reviewer does not mean you have to be a momma's boy. It means you pick your voice and you stick to it. This could be pure snark and rage. It could be calm and dignified. It could be completely silly. Whatever it is, figure out what you are doing early, make an effort to communicate your approach and principles to your audience, and figure out what that tone means for the content of your review.
For a personal example, I found that my voice is best when I am talking through my head like a stuffy British gentleman, so I settled on something detached, classy, and laser-focused on the content of the story. You will notice I rarely if ever mention the author's name, or even the author at all, in my rejections. "The story" does things that weigh for or against it, and when I offer advice, it is to a "you." This is an attempt to keep the conversation focused on my goal: deciding whether the story is Library material. The author is irrelevant apart from being the person I am addressing, and when things get personal, they get heated, so I try to keep persons out of the discussion whenever possible. Instead, I keep to discussing specific instances from the story with an interpretation of the consequences and how they harmed my experience of the story as a whole. The net effect is that I avoid barbing people without meaning to and if someone has an issue with my decision, we have more than enough concrete material to sit down and talk about, so things are more likely to be quickly and civilly resolved.
Of course, notice now that I have established this persona, I must keep it up (at least insofar as I am acting officially as a reviewer). People have come to know how I speak and what I am about, so they become accustomed to interpreting what my words mean to them. For me to abandon these principles is to ask all of the people who browse my rejections to cast aside the habitual understanding we have built up and accept that something completely different has eaten SirTruffles and is now impersonating him. This is the price of being known: people know you and they expect to continue knowing you until they lose interest.
But consistency is more than tone. It also encompasses all of the questions we asked ourselves in section two: your assumed audience, your intent, the questions you seek to answer in every review, and the principles that guide you to your answers. To change your answer to any one of these questions is a Big Deal. If you cannot give a consistent answer to them, you will not be as effective.
I seem to have written into Tuesday. That's a bother. I believe I shall stop here and pick up on some more technical details next blog. If you happen to have any burning questions about general reviewing, feel free to toss them in the comments and I may be able to work them into the next installment or answer them outright. As always, please keep official Twilight's Library business to PMs or group threads. Thank you.
If I may, I'd like to slightly parahrase a quote from a game I recently played:
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Haven't played that in forever. Good game was excellent
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This was actually my first foray into it. Gamecube version. Still haven't quite beaten it, but I'm doing some of the endgame odds and ends.
Yard sales and ebay are sometimes useful for finding things I missed out on way back when.