and I would put myself into that catagory as well. It's no sin, good writers are rare as are any good artists.
Thus, I take as my motto: Brevity is the soul of wit.
I try to keep to the facts, sort of like a news story, and inject the minimum of the inconsequential.
After all, the review that is not read is the shortest one of all, isn't it?
And like BP says, please use a paragraph break for God's sake.
do you prefer short and to the point reviews or the long unending ones? ter allows 4000 characters for general discussion and 6000 for the juicy details..some reviewers use them all..i personally start to nod off reading these long tedious reviews and usually never finish..i like the short concise ones that can describe the session without belaboring it..we are older..have much less patience..and dont want to get new reading glasses every 6 months..your thoughts...
I certainly wouldn't want the literary-minded to limit themselves in their second-by-second descriptions.
They have total freedom to write that stuff. And I have total freedom to ignore it.
What interests me more are the blatant exaggerations. TER officially considers all reviews to be "fiction" - and many reviewers seem to take that very much to heart.
Even the greatest of Football games only entails 60 minutes of playing time.
So if you fast forward through the huddles, the 2nd down runs for no gain, the commercials, reviewed plays, halftime, timeouts, and all the other bullshit having nothing to do with the game action, you can get the good stuff down to 10-15 minutes.
Reviews should be the same way. Lots of details on the important stuff, skip through the 'filler stuff.
Chiguy
I try to write a review like a newspaper story. Get the general part of it in the first part then go into the details. I would hope I write a good enough review that those reading it are captured in the first sentence or two.
3-5 sentences in length.
Most people I know do not know how to write a proper sentence. Poor writing is a growing trend among our youth. A significant contributor to the demise of good writing is technology, with its abbreviated code of cryptic prose. Perhaps it is product of our busy lifestyles or it could be we are just lazy.
I have read some reviews that are crap, and others that are a great erotic story. Perhaps we should have a review performance score.
I don't mind long reviews, but I absolutely will not read one that is one big long paragraph. Mine are usually kinda long, but I break them up in paragraphs, esp when the action changes.
Swim
and I would put myself into that catagory as well. It's no sin, good writers are rare as are any good artists.
Thus, I take as my motto: Brevity is the soul of wit.
I try to keep to the facts, sort of like a news story, and inject the minimum of the inconsequential.
After all, the review that is not read is the shortest one of all, isn't it?
And like BP says, please use a paragraph break for God's sake.
and try to be a bit above average with my reviews but I do have a tendency to be long-winded.
BTW, 'Brevity is the soul of wit' i from Hamlet, and I also try to remember it, not always successfully.
Thus, I take as my motto: Brevity is the soul of wit.
I try to keep to the facts, sort of like a news story, and inject the minimum of the inconsequential.
After all, the review that is not read is the shortest one of all, isn't it?
And like BP says, please use a paragraph break for God's sake.
I've posted a link to it.
Shakespeare was being a bit humorous here because the speaker, Polonius, was one of the Bard's greatest windbags, and his ramblings were only magnified by his metaphoric statement.
Still and all, I take it as one of life's great mottos.
Another is this:
God gave us two ears and one mouth. That was a subtle hint.
They should make all the verbs in red font color and the adjectives in yellow font color!
...that may make it short or it may require it to be long. I always intend mine to be short. Sometimes they actually are. Once I begin writing I find it requires a bit more than I intended to actually tell what happened. I do use paragraph breaks now. I wrote one or two without them not really giving it any thought and didn't realize how hard it was to read until it was submitted. A thread similar to this one was helpful in thinking about how to right a review. I actually look at the character count when I'm finished and if I used more than half I reread to see if I need to edit what I've written. Sometime yes, sometimes no.
I don't like the four or five sentence reviews nor the reviews that look like a bulleted list.
EX: 1. we kissed
2. she gave me a blow job
3.....
Well you get the point.
That worked for Julius Caesar but some reviews are so short that they add no value to the rating. I find the ratings are misleading I would rather read more detail and see the date through the writers eyes. But when I see a single short paragraph I skip the review all together and move on.