Reviews

In this lesson we focused in writing reviews, starting by looking a some of Roger Ebert's reviews, in particular, his review of the film 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'. We studied this review in great detail, looking at the features, and his writing style.

For this weeks assignment we had to write a review on any media product. I chose to do a review on the TV show, 'The Inbetweeners'. However, we had to write the review for a specific publication so it suited the audience, views and writing styles of that publication. We looked at notes on how to write award winning articles from http://jonathandeamer.com/2007/06/12/how-to-write-great-reviews/ and http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/09/16/how-to-write-reviews/.

Before doing our review, we had to research the publication that we were writing in the style of; I chose to do my review in the style of 'The Independent' newspaper. When researching for the review I looked back over the past reviews produced by the paper, and studied the styles and vocabulary used.

My review was positively written about the show, giving the impression that the show is very funny. I started by writing an introduction to the review, which set the tone of the review, giving a brief description of the show. Next, I began to go into more detail of the particular episode I was reviewing, then the main body, which walked through the episode giving opinions and small quotes. The review was then concluded with a short piece of information about the show.

I found writing the review not to hard as I followed the notes from the links above and tried to use witty and complex vocabulary, however, it was hard to find the right publication for my review, as most TV reviews are often written in a 'Last Night's TV' style; the publication writes about a couple of programmes, with only a small section dedicated to each show. The brief for the assignment was that it had to be no smaller than 500 words, so I couldn't use these publications, as I was only reviewing one text. Furthermore, when studying review writing, we learnt that you should be ruthless when editing your review; however good a line is, it should only be put in if it helps the overall review. I found this difficult as there was a lot of lines and quotes that I thought were quite good and witty, however, some did not help the overall review, so I found it difficult knowing which lines to cut, and which ones to keep.


Next week we will be focusing on editorials.