You have a mouth, so scream!
Apr 16 '00
Friday afternoon I suffered a horrible tragedy!
I had spent an hour writing one of my best reviews, and I was immensely proud of it. It was a review of a KPBS kids' show that is not yet listed on the epinions site.
I will be the first person to write a review of this program, and I will bring in millions of people who are looking for information on it, and I will be informative and thorough and organised, and it will be wonderful, I said to myself in a moment of truly selfish glee. This is the beginning of fame and fortune I continued, and then, full of myself and starry-eyed, I pressed submit.
I could almost smell the problem before I noticed it. The sour stench of disappointment filled my nose and throat as I watched the spinning beach ball freeze and the terrifying blank box pop up on my monitor. It was not just a crash, it was a devastating 25 care pileup. My epinion was totalled, along with with my haphazard arrogance.
I started crying. I really did. I immediately phoned my husband at work and whined at him (doing a startling imitation of my 2 year old daughter), pleading for advice. He didn't have any, and later that evening, when he came home, we searched the disk and the free space in a vain attempt to recover the review, but it was hopelessly lost.
This episode inspired me to write this epinion. I'm writing it in my eudora mail program, which is actually a good thing being as I frequently use the British variant (spelling) for many of my words and I've tailored my spellswell to accept them. It's -also- a good thing because I'm going to mail the epinion back to myself -and- save it in my outbox -- thereby circumventing the devastation which utterly ruined my happiness last week.
My thoughts on what -Not- to do when writing an opinion:
1) Don't write it online, at the moment, in the form.
The odds are good that in sometime during your epinions career, you will have a computer crash or a reload problem, and lose your work. This is very painful, particularly if you've spent a long time writing a good review and you don't have it backed up anywhere.
Writing it this way also prevents you from full creativity. As you write in a text program, you have the option of playing with words. You can spend the time studying your sentences and trying to find the best way to twist a phrase or make a point. If you're really serious, you can have the program check your grammar and your spelling.
The form on epinions is difficult to look at all at once. If you write a longer review, you have to scroll up and down inside of the scroll bar on the main web page. It's inconvenient. It's hard to maneuver.
Spelling mistakes are more difficult to find. The only way to use the epinions spellchecker is to preview the epinion and then move back to the form page. The form page doesn't remind you of your spelling errors, so even though you may see them in the preview, you may not be able to find them in the edit. This can be a lot of frustration as you go back and forth; a needless inconvenience that can be avoided by writing your work in another format and then copying and pasting it into the epinions form.
2) Don't be care - less.
Be passionate about your writing; be passionate about your epinion. Write about things that matter to you and things that you care about. Nothing is more boring to me than reading an epinion which has no spunk or personal style. Find something that you absolutely can't live without in your product : maybe it's the wild shade of blue, or the noise the cap makes when you take it off. Too quirky? That's ok! We as readers want to know what you love. We want to see -you- amidst the product; we want to see whether we should buy it (see it, read it, rent it) too.
3) Don't be obscure.
Being your individual self and being out of touch are completely different. Know the names for the parts of your product, or be able to describe them so well that we can understand what exactly you are talking about. Understand what you do when you use your product, and know how to explain it to us. Make sense.
4) Don't be incomplete.
Be thorough. Think about what -you- would want to know if -you- were reading the review, and then expound on the idea. Describe your product to us, tell us how it works, tell us how it sounds, how what it cooks tastes like. Involve all of our senses and make us feel like we have that object in our house and are using it ourselves.
5) Don't plagiarise.
I am always disappointed when I see people who have copied reviews from websites. I can get that information from the company any time -- I want to see the -personal- side. I want to know what they don't tell you : that it burned your pop tart and exploded, that it is too heavy and bulky to carry around, that the wheels stick when your toddler tries to turn a corner. That's what epinions is all about -- taking personal experience with a product and sharing it as a contrast to all the hype that the marketing department puts out. A plagiarist is not only stealing copyright material, they're also just adding to the company noise.
Be man (or woman) enough to write your own epinion. Stealing just plain sucks.
6) Don't base your worth on your ratings.
This was really difficult for me at first, and oftentimes still is. I'm trying desperately to get beyond the politics of this place -- to care about what I review and what I write -- regardless of the money or the recommendations I get.
It's very easy for me to get caught up in a "worth" struggle. I feel like I'm better if I'm well-read or well-rated; worse if I'm struggling along. This is just asinine. I'm the same person, regardless.
My opinion matters and so does yours.
Write as if you are immensely proud of the voice that epinons has given you, and let the people listen. You are unique and have insights that no one else can offer. Share them. Be real. Help change the world, one review at a time.
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Epinions.com ID:
tesserae
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Reviews written: 53
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