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?
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.”
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.
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.
Since the assignment was inspired by one of Kim’s grad-school assignments, I’m hoping she can get more out of the statistics than I’ve been able to. This was an interesting exercise, though, and you might want to try it with a couple of your own book reviews. I’ve learned a few things from it, and I hope they help make my book reviews better – since that’s kind of the point of this project!
