Bloggiesta Update: Day 4

Theme: Reviews

My goal: to catch up on back reviews.

I partially participated in the Twitter chat today because I was actually home from work when it was scheduled. However, there wasn't a lot of consensus about what makes a good review so I will just give a few of my opinions about good reviews...and mind you, I don't always follow them!

• Creative blog titles are best but they are hard to think up and some readers just want title and author.
• The summary or synopsis of the book should be brief, one or two paragraphs only and should be written by the reviewer, but just grabbed from Goodreads or elsewhere.
• Review can include spoilers if there is plenty of notice  that it is coming. Then readers have a choice to read on or not. I rarely include spoilers but sometimes feel like it is necessary to make my point.
• I use links because I want to make sure to give credit where I got my information and to avoid the appearance of plagiarism. There were a variety of opinions about this topic but one blogger admitted that she often didn't include links due to laziness.  Hey, that's what I fight at school with high school writers.
• My favorite reviews include a statement about who the target audience is, including concerns about age-appropriateness.

On a personal level I counted today and of  the 23 books I've read this year I've only written ten reviews, and two of those reviews were incomplete. I knew I wasn't up to date on my blog, but had no idea I was that behind. I analyzed the books and selected five more I hope to review in the next two weeks. And, of course, stay current moving forward.  I've already started. Today I got off a review for Three Men in a Boat and another review is half written and will likely be published tomorrow.

I am adding a rating system back for my reviews.

We'll see if  I can keep this up!

Here is the link for today's Twitter chat. It has some links to other sites about writing great reviews which I will look at tomorrow when I am not so tired.