In YWS, all of us encouraged to do reviews for one another, mainly to help the writer in improving his or her story. There are many reviews being done everyday on YWS, but not all of them are full in depth critiques. There are different types of reviews.
1. The short review: This kind of review has only about one paragraph, and in it the reviewer basically praises the work for all it's aspects. This kind of review gives the writer a good morale boost, but then again it doesn't cover what a full review would.
2. The nitpick: This kind of review focuses on the nitpicks. Grammar, punctuation, spelling errors and such. This type of review is usually reserved for works which is written using poor English or the writer has a weak command of the English language.
3. The full in depth critique: This is the kind of critique that can really help the writer improve on their stories/novels. This kind of critique really goes into the story, the plot, the characters, the mood, everything. This critique picks the story apart and goes through even the more minor details. This is the kind of critique that may be harsh but at the same time helpful. Also this kind of review usually gets the reviewer 100 points. How then, to achieve this?
The Beginning
First off the reviewer may start of with praising the author for a great job or a good plot there. This is the starting of the review when the reviewer will usually give a general idea if he/she likes the story.
The Middle
This is the meatiest part of the review, over here many things can be covered. Setting, character, dialogue, description. realism, clarity, pace, sentence structure, paragraph structure are some of the main things that many reviewers go through in their reviews. This is also the part where the reviewer lists down in detail the parts that he/she liked and the parts where he/she thinks could use some more working on. This is supposed to be the part of the review where the reviewer pours everything out to the writer.
For different genres, the reviews are different. Fantasy stories cover more on dialogue and setting. Mainly because in a fantasy story, the world usually looks different and there may be alien races who speak in a different tongue.
For science fiction stories, realism and setting is important, dialogue plays a rather important role too. As the same with fantasy stories, the world and characters may be out of the world and thus the writer needs to reintroduce it to the reader.
For romance, character plays a big role and so does dialogue, I think most of you know why. Romance stories deal a lot with the feelings of the characters and how they interact with each other.
For sentence, paragraph structure as well as setting, these three are usually the general parts of any review, where there isn't a particular genre to it. Most reviews have a hard time identifying sentence structures.
Sentence structure is how the writer starts the sentence and ends it. Does it always begin with "I" or does it always have exclamation marks at the end of every sentence? Also how long is each sentence, and how often are commas and periods used?
Paragraph, easily enough to spot, paragraph structure is how long paragraphs are. Long paragraphs are usually hard to read and turn reviewers off while shorter paragraphs are eye candy to us.
Pace, this is a very important part of the story. It shows how well the writer has planned to write out his/her story. Especially when there are many characters, or different time periods, example, past present and future. Pace comes in when there is a suddenly a drastic change in something in the story. Drastic changes aren't wrong, but there has to be a reason or motive behind it for it to be accepted.
The Ending
This is where the reviewer would summarize the entire review in a few words or reinforce certain ideas he/she wants to put across. This is also the part where the reviewer may offer extra help through PMs and such.
This is the general idea of the different parts of a review and how you can get that 100 point review by looking at nearly every aspect of the story. It is also a in depth critique which dives in to the story in detail rather than just talking about it in general.
Hopefully for all reviewers out there this will be helpful towards them, in being able to give a good review and knowing how to elaborate on their reviews.
Gender:
Points: 13932
Reviews: 197