How to Make a Nice, Neat, Peanut Butter Sandwich that Everyone Will Want to Eat.Mar 15 '01 (Updated Mar 28 '01) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Mmmm... Nothing tastes better than a nice, neat, peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a tall glass of milk!
A long, long time ago at an Elementary School far, far away, my 6th grade teacher tried to teach her students about Henry Ford and how his assembly line process revolutionized modern industry. She illustrated the point by having us make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Half of the class would make them by hand normally. The other half of the class used Ford’s assembly line, with one person taking out the bread, one applying the peanut butter, one slathering on the jelly, one slapping the two pieces of bread together, and the last kid throwing them into a plastic baggie. At the end of the sandwich-making time period our class assessed the results. The sandwiches made by hand were neat and tidy (one girl even trimmed the crusts off hers). The assembly line side easily doubled the amount of sandwiches the first side had produced, but most of their PB&J sandwiches were sloppy. Several times the kid spreading peanut butter had torn the bread with his plastic knife (Shut up! It was chunky style!). Jelly oozed out of the sides of some sandwiches, and was almost nonexistent on others. The overall quality of the sandwiches was terrible. Our class then attempted to sell the sandwiches to other classes in the school. Even though the ones produced by us assembly line kids were bountiful indeed, the other Grade Schoolers quickly snapped up the ones made by hand (the crustless ones were first to go). When it was all over, the only remaining sandwiches were the ones made by Ford’s assembly line. It was then, the teacher told the class the point of the exercise. Often, when something is produced in mass quantity, the quality of that product is reduced dramatically. Is it just me or have there been a lot more assembly line PB&J reviews coming into Epinions lately? It seems like every other review in the “Just In” area is some quickie junk that someone slapped together so they could cash in on their gigantic 10-cent check. The spelling and grammar is usually horrible, and their knowledge of the product is questionable at best. Staying true to the assembly line process, the writers continuously post many of these poor reviews, pushing the good ones into the background. They force me to drop my SH or NH into a big messy puddle of grape jelly. I started to complain about this, but then I thought, why don’t I do something useful? I know how to write a good product review, so why don’t I share it with the Epinions community? Hopefully, some of these new writers will read this and apply the methodology to their work. So everyone, break out your aprons, because I’m going to show you how to make a neat and tidy peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Pre-Writing: Get out your bread and PB&J. Know the Product - If you were watching Ebert and Roeper one night and they said, “you know this movie was so terrible, we walked out in the first five minutes,” would you would you trust their opinion? How could someone possibly form an opinion on something they haven’t fully experienced? It’s the same way with your reviews. Know the product inside and out before you begin your review. Gather Information - Try to get as much background information as possible on the product or service. Read the box, go to the company’s web site, or do whatever you need to do to get specific info on the product or manufacturer. Make a Quick Outline - You don’t have to spend a whole lot of time on it. Just decide which points you want to hit and how you want to write, then write it down. Writing: Liberally spread peanut butter on one piece of bread and jelly on the other. Don’t be TOO objective – Many Epinions users seem to think that the writer needs to be completely objective when writing a review. I somewhat agree. The problem comes in when the review is so objective that it is completely free of an actual opinion . This is Epinions, not Ereports! If a product or service sucks, say it sucks (actually, be a little more descriptive). Don’t be afraid to tell us how you feel, because that’s the reason most of us signed up in the first place. Use Word Processing software - You’ve finally finished typing that flawless, sparkling review into that field in Epinions, and click “Publish”. After waiting for what seems like an eternity, you finally get the “Page Not Available” error of death. You have to retype the whole thing over again! Noooooooooo! How many times has this happened to you? If you’re using AOL, I would guess more than a few. A way around this inconvenience is to type your review using word processing software such as MS Word. This will allow you to save your work periodically, as well as make use of tools such as spell-check and grammar-check. More is More - Yes, the Epinions minimum is 100 words, but take a look at those short reviews. How many of them would you point your best friend to if he had questions about specific products or services? Not very many, right? Now take another look at those short reviews. How many of them are rated with a SH or NH? You see my point. Don’t finish writing until you’ve finished writing. One of the things the Epinions community craves is detail. We want tons and tons of it. After reading your review, I want to feel like I used the darn thing myself. It is extremely hard to accomplish that with only100 words, so take the time and do the work. As a reference, my reviews usually average out to about 2 - 3 pages, using 12 point Times New Roman font. As a rule of thumb, non-technical reviews (Health & Beauty, Pet Supplies) tend to be a great deal shorter than technical reviews. Space it out- Nothing makes a review harder to read than having it all crammed together in one tight paragraph. Try to limit your paragraphs to three or four sentences. Separate paragraphs by at least 1 space. Post-Writing: Put the pieces together (plain sides out) and trim the crusts. Spell check- I absolutely love spell-check. On some of my worse days, my reviews are essentially unintelligible gibberish until I hit F7. It only takes a few minutes to make sure that your spelling is perfect. Check again after it’s posted- It seems like I catch most of my serious errors (grammatical, mismatched/missing HTML tags) after I post my articles. As soon as you post, view your article to see if there’s anything you missed. I recommend not going back to correct minor errors immediately, because while you’re correcting and trying to re-publish, your draft is unreadable to Epinions readers. Meanwhile, your review is sliding to the bottom of the “Just In” area as new reviews come in. Wait until the number of hits levels off, then go correct. You’re all done! You either have in front of you a well-written product review getting VHs, or a delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Either one is pretty much guaranteed to put a smile on your face. Now all that’s left is to have a big glass of milk and enjoy.  |
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