Evaluation/Review
You have likely visited an unfamiliar city or neighborhood. When you aren’t in familiar surroundings, what do you do if you want to find something to eat or do for fun? You probably open your phone and search on Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, or another app or website dedicated to providing reviews, or critical appraisals. Even when closer to home, many people, whether looking for a unique local restaurant, a new hiking trail, or an auto mechanic, may base their decisions on online reviews.
You may even have written a review of a product or service and posted it online yourself. In your review, you shared your evaluation—your overall thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses—of the customer service, atmosphere, prices, quality, and so on. You decided on a set of criteria, or characteristics that determine a positive experience, and made your evaluation of the business according to those criteria and your experiences with similar products or services. Maybe you used a rating system to give five stars or used the phrase “would not recommend” to make your negative judgment clear.
In performing these tasks, you engaged in the evaluation or review genre, or form of writing used to evaluate businesses, products, and art forms—including restaurants, health care, cell phones, cars, video games, books, films, and more. Throughout this chapter, you will learn about the characteristics of evaluations and how to write them.
Examples of Evaluations/Reviews
Key Features of an Evaluation/Review
A Description of the Subject
You should include just enough information to help readers who may not be familiar with your subject understand it. Remember, the goal is to evaluate, not summarize. For instance, if writing about a movie, you’d want to describe the main plot points, only providing what readers need to understand the context of your evaluation, avoiding retelling the entire story.
Another thing to keep in mind is that depending on your topic and medium, some of this descriptive information may be in visual or audio form.
Clearly Defined Criteria
Since you are evaluating the subject, you will need to determine clear criteria as the basis for your judgment. In reviews or other evaluations written for a broad audience, you can integrate the criteria into the discussion as reasons for your assessment. In more formal evaluations, you may need to announce your criteria explicitly. For instance, you could evaluate a film based on the stars’ performances, the complexity of their characters, and the film’s coherence. There are lots of other criteria to choose from, depending on your film choice.
A few things to keep in mind when coming up with your criteria:
- Don’t try to have too many things to evaluate. Using three to four elements to evaluate should be enough criteria to support an overall evaluation of the subject.
- Pick things relevant to evaluating your subject. For instance, if you are specifically reviewing a movie, you don’t want to include cri