The current task for the Blog Improvement Project is a bit unusual, so I'll let Kim explain it herself:
"This week’s task is a content analysis of book reviews to get some info about reviews. How long are they? How personal are they? How many paragraphs does the average book review have?The task asked participants to choose a favorite book review from our blogs, and then find at least one other professional review of the same book. We then completed a Google Docs spreadsheet with data about each review according to the columns Kim set up. If we wanted to do the analysis on more than two reviews of the same book, we had that option.
By comparing book reviews written by bloggers to reviews written by professionals, I hope we can come up with some interesting stats to know more about what makes a book review.
Doing this isn’t going to definitively say what is a “good” review — I mostly want to compare some numbers between professional and amateur (not the word I want exactly, but you get it) reviews."
Most of the data the spreadsheet collects is related to word counts, which gave me a chance to give that particular tool in Google Docs a workout. Most word-processing programs have this function, as far as I know; I even did a copy-and-paste of the text in the professional reviews I cited so I could easily run the counts on them. (It does sentence and paragraph counts too.) There are also some content-related questions to answer about each review.
I chose to analyze my review of The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver, which I compared to reviews from Entertainment Weekly (EW.com), The Guardian (UK), and The New York Times. If you're curious about the statistical details, please go and check out that spreadsheet link. I'm really not sure what any of it means, but I did notice a few things:
- I knew this anyway, but this confirmed that I do have a tendency to write long, involved sentences. The longest sentence in my review was 83 words, more than twice as long as the longest sentence in the Times review. I should work on chopping things down to size.
- However, the Guardian's review was more than 300 words longer than mine, and at almost 1000 words in total, was by far the longest. I found it rather tiring to read, too. I think a thousand words may be a bit more than most book reviews need.
- Part of the extra length of the Guardian piece was more about the author than the book itself - it speculated on the novel's possible autobiographical elements. Before I read this review, I hadn't realized that there might be any in the first place, and I'm not sure that knowing it now makes much difference.
- All of the reviews included essential information about the plot and characters. However, it struck me that both the Times and Guardian reviews interpreted them in less nuanced, more black-and-white terms than my review or EW's did. (This observation probably won't matter to you unless you've read this book yourself.)
- I use a rating system in my book reviews, but I've been ambivalent about it. This analysis did show me a rating really can be helpful in summing up a reviewer's impressions, though. The Times and Guardian reviewers didn't use ratings, although I should note that the Times' reviewer seemed to make her opinion pretty clear in her last paragraph. (I'm still not entirely clear on the Guardian critic's overall opinion.) I've gotten out of the habit of reading EW's book reviews, but now I remember what I like about them - they assign letter grades, and explain how they arrived at them.
- The Guardian and Times reviewers made no personal references to themselves in their reviews. I know that's journalistically correct, but a book review is an opinion piece - it's not objective journalism. I'd rather get a sense of the reader's experience of the book in a review now, as opposed to an authoritative voice of judgment. Maybe it's less "professional" in tone, but it communicates more of what I really want to know about the book.
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9 comments via Blogger:
I skipped this assignment because I thought it was over my head.
I found your analysis really interesting. I'm going to attempt this project over the weekend. I'll be interested to see what conclusions I come too.
Kathy (Bermudaonion) - I almost skipped it for the same reason, but it turned out to be rather fun. I'm still not sure what it means, though :-).
Jackie (FarmLaneBooks) - I'm glad you're going to give it a shot! I'll look for your updates in the spreadsheet.
This is so fascinating! Looks like the quality of your review beats those old fogies -- excellent work!
That's an interesting experiment. I personally love talking about how a book relates to me when I review it. Blog readers expect that. It's fun not being constrained by journalistic practices. The writing is more "real".
An interesting exercise, indeed! I know most of my reviews run long, sometimes over 1000 words. When I get on a roll, I just can't stop. :-) I have more fun writing the personalized reviews than the other kind, I admit, and so those are my favorite to read.
Jen (Bibliolatrist) - I'm not sure I'd go that far, but thanks :-). I think the more traditional style of review has some merits, but I realize why I don't get as much of them any more.
Dad's House - It was more enlightening than I thought it would be. And I don't think I could write a review without talking about how the book affected me, so it's nice that I don't have to.
Wendy (Literary Feline) - Since I tend to go on quite a bit in my reviews too, I understand! I'd like to try to rein them in a bit, but I want to make sure I include enough about the book itself to be informative, as well as more of a reaction than "I liked/didn't like it." And I actually like to talk about some of the literary elements :-).
Thanks for doing this Florinda! Participation has been kind of low, so seeing your entries and post made me really happy.
Your conclusions are exactly what I was hoping people would notice as they read. The idea of doing this was to just spend a little while thinking about how your reviews compare to other reviews. Stuff like long sentences really pop out after you do a little comparing.
I like your observation about ratings and knowing what the reviewer thought. I read a review from the New York Times, and although I could tell the reviewer liked the book, it was hard for me to tell how much. I also like the one about length -- my professional review was over 1,000 words with super long paragraphs, which made it hard to read. It reemphasized to me how important it is to keep paragraphs short online.
Again, thanks for doing this. I'm glad you tried it out even though it seemed weird! Hopefully more people will do it so I can play around with the numbers (mostly just doing averages, probably, but I think that'll be interesting anyway).
Kim - I'm glad I did it, actually. It was rather enlightening, and made me think about the reviews from some different perspectives. And based on some of the comments people have left here, seeing it in action piqued some interest, so there may be more participants yet to come.
I'll be looking for your analysis. Thanks for such an interesting assignment!
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