1. WHAT MAKES A GREAT REVIEW?
A review can be a 2,000-word, state-of-the-art epic illustrated with a glossy photo-spread and splashed over four pages in an upmarket magazine with an international readership. A review can be a 150-word near-haiku included in a round-up of summer beach-reads in a local newspaper. It is probably easier to attain a towering reputation as a reviewer if your work fits the first of these formats, but you will probably start with the second. Of course itâs a challenge to shine in a space the size of an iPod Nano but writers do that. A great review doesnât need space; usually, however, it does need to touch base with the following six qualities.
ARRESTING
Like all great journalism, great reviews grab the readers in the first half-sentence. Lord Beaverbrook, the legendary Canadian press baron of the mid-twentieth century, used to tell his reporters to âPut your best strawberries on top,â meaning that they should lead every piece with the most attractive fact in the story. We will discuss the techniques of compelling writing later in this book. For now, let us just state that the No 1 attribute of a great review is its outstanding, upfront readability. It will stop you dead, grab your attention, tempt you, tease you, impress you and insist that your life will be poorer if you donât read the story to the very last word. As does this introduction to a television review by Nancy Banks-Smith of the Guardian:
INTERESTING
Well, yes. Obviously. A reviewer who has got the readersâ attention must then work twice as hard to keep it to the end of the piece. âYou should entertain, amuse and touch people,â says Anthony Quinn of the Independent, considered to be the film criticâs critic but also a respected literary reviewer who was one of the judges for the 2007 Man Booker prize.
Every publication tries to estimate the proportion of readers who are lost in the course of reading a piece. Web editors talk about the âstickinessâ of a feature, meaning the number of pages which a visitor will click through to after the first hit. Methods of measuring page traffic differ but the chilling result is always the same â the drop-out rate is huge. On my own newspaper the surveys showed that while 98% of readers would look at an articleâs headline, maybe 60% would then begin the piece, but only 3% would finish it.
So â how to be interesting? Do you have a sinking suspicion that if you need to ask that you must be a natural-born bore? Excellent. Worrying that youâre being boring is where you start to get interesting. Itâs a tough quality to define but you know it when you read it: the previous quotation, despite its elegance and wit, manages to feature sex, royalty, shopping, a dodgy credit card and bad behaviour in two little paragraphs. For the majority of the readers in our developed world that formula would work pretty well, but it would be hard to apply to a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos. Worse, a bad writer can tick all those boxes and still send the readers to sleep in two sentences.
Reviews can be immensely entertaining, especially the bad ones. Thereâs nothing quite as amusing as breathtaking bitchiness in print. You read one of the great pannings of all time, such as Mark Kermodeâs condemnation of Pirates of the Caribbean II, and because it flows as irresistibly as the Mississippi and sparkles like chilled Kristal you imagine that writing like that is easy. Then you set out to compose your own killer notice and find that you run out of words for âboringâ after the first paragraph.
That little word âinterestingâ implies more than half the art of writing. To offer your readers prose that is glowing, supple and totally irresistible you need a rich vocabulary, a lyrical sense of language and the ability to build, refine and display an argument. You need to express strong feelings in a vivid vocabulary. You need to be able to educate your readers without them knowing it and win their sympathy while seeming not to care what they think. You need a well-developed sensitivity to their attitudes, for as many readers check out because theyâre offended, as give up because theyâre bored.
AUTHORITATIVE
A reviewer writes as an expert. Even when a reviewer pretends to be responding as a simple, ordinary member of the audience, she or he is in fact writing with the benefit of privileged information, accumulated experience, and often with academic knowledge as well. These three attributes give a reviewer the special insight which in turn establishes his or her authority with the reader. A reviewer, by definition, knows more and knows better. She or he has a sharper perception of form, a more rigorous understanding of content and a sophisticated perspective on the artistic context of the work. Therefore, a reviewerâs opinion has more merit than that of an ordinary person. As reviewing is increasingly democratised through interactive enterprises like blogs and review sites, so the premium on a criticâs authority has risen; itâs the one thing we can offer that the average representative of the cyber-rabble canât match.
How does a reviewer project this authority? In some fields, notably the visual arts, reviewers have almost developed an elite dialect of critical terms in which to discuss the works in question. They use a privileged vocabulary, often to the extent that a casual reader cannot follow their argument without asking for explanation. They refer to critical theories and assume their audience has a large body of knowledge from which to understand the context of the work.
These strategies are not necessary to demonstrate the writerâs authority but in some fields they are customary. What is necessary is for the reviewer to make his or her expertise clear to the reader. Often this is done simply by offering readers the extra information that will allow them to appreciate the work more fully. It takes different forms in different media; a film review in a celebrity magazine will mention the latest gossip about the stars, a film review in a serious cinema periodical will refer to the directorâs previous work.
PROFESSIONAL
A great review is also a great work of journalism and stands the tests of accuracy, balance and concision. Accuracy implies not only getting the facts right but also including the essential information about a work. Balance presents a reviewer with a series of challenges which we shall explore in more detail later. Reviewing is more of a balancing act than any other role in journalism. A reviewer is always a servant with at least two masters and often more. Between the art and the medium, between artists and editors, between the simple passion of an aficionado and the complex responsibilities of a reporter, a reviewer needs to make difficult decisions. Every individual draws their own line. Some adopt extreme measures to maintain intellectual detachment; others plunge over their heads into the world of their art.
Concision is a hard discipline but one that a writer must learn well in order to be a good reviewer. An experienced journalistâs first question is always, âHow many words have I got?â Beginning journalists often imagine that it is right to give an editor more words than they have requested. Big mistake. Editors like nothing better than copy written exactly to length. They do not like having to perform major surgery on a self-indulgent mess of writing when the edition deadline is 30 seconds away. If editors need a couple of extra paragraphs to have in hand in case their layout changes during the production process, they will ask for them by including them in the word count. Most copy is cut and the wise writer balances the piece carefully within the given length.
PERSONAL
Objectivity has only a small place in criticism. In fact, the essence of great criticism is the writerâs love affair with the art. As Norman Lebrecht says,
A reviewerâs response is essentially and inescapably subjective but a great reviewer manages to define an identity so precisely that readers can relate to the writing as they would to a person. Readers will not necessarily agree with a critic, but they will enjoy the vitality and precision of a well-developed critical voice and they will form their own judgement of the work in relation to the criticâs stance.
As a new writer, nothing mystified me more than the emphasis that writing tutors place upon the âvoiceâ. I had written a succession of well-reviewed books without ever giving a single thought to my âvoiceâ. Telling a writing student to develop a voice seemed as unhelpful as asking them to think of a funny joke or name six famous Belgians. Just asking makes the mind go blank. In fashion, the equivalent impossible was âstyleâ. Style is something that models are adored for having but which you canât teach anyone to develop. Same with voice. A writer develops a voice by writing, by putting stuff on a page that pleases them and deleting stuff that doesnât.
Confidence grows with the voice. After a while, you get a sense of what pleases you. The next step is to find out what pleases your readers. Self-delusion is death at this point. One of the famous factoids about Marilyn Monroe is that she scanned her contact sheets and her rushes obsessively, seeing what worked for her and what didnât. Legend does not record that she looked over her pictures and decided that it was the photographerâs fault that she looked bad with frizzy red hair. Similarly, a writer should be sensitive to how their writing is received and, if readers are bored, confused or offended, they should not place the blame for that anywhere but with themselves.
APPROPRIATE
As we have already considered, reviews are carried by a very wide range of media and so presented to very different readerships. What is considered a good review in a venerable film magazine such as Sight & Sound will bore the readers of Hello! senseless.
Every medium has a conception of its audience and most have a strong imperative to deliver a target readership to its advertisers. Very few media are financed by sales; while the cover price may be a significant element in the revenue of a well-established city newspaper, most of a mediumâs income is derived from advertising and those who plan media campaigns choose to advertise in a certain medium because it has the right readership profile for their product.
This means that every journalist feels the imprint of the news values and editorial style of the medium for which they are writing. The subject, content, language and opinions of a review will all be appropriate for that medium. It is essential for beginning writers to understand this; the belief that the obvious brilliance of your writing will over-ride news values is misguided and will collect rejections as long as you hold it. In many cases the most successful journalists are natural partners for their publications, with the same values, interests and lifestyles as their target readers. Thus Toby Young writes effortlessly for highly educated, somewhat right-wing readers of Londonâs Spectator magazine while Derek Malcolm was just fine with the leftwing cineastes reading the Guardian.
Appropriate writing immediately creates a bond with the reader. Here is the novelist Martin Amis reviewing a book about the fan culture of football for a rigorously high-toned literary periodical:
