Eloquence In Ascribing Rampant Suckage
The last time I wrote about reviews, one of the discussions that felt out of it (both here and elsewhere) was the easy confusion between negative reviews and bad ones. There’s a reason for that; most negative reviews are also bad reviews, in the sense that a “bad” review is one that doesn’t do a very good job of being a review. Bad reviews generally fill one of two functions. If they’re positive, they reinforce the reviewer’s fannish appreciation of the book in question; if they’re negative, they’re about the reviewer being clever. In neither case are they actually about the merits or lack thereof of the book in question, and thus as such they fail as reviews. At best, they’re opinions, but since they don’t touch on the material in a real, interesting, or serious way, they’re not really reviews.
Of the two, bad negative reviews are more common and more interesting to talk about. In part, this is because it’s a lot harder to write a negative review well than it is a positive one. After all, if a book is good, then there’s lots of evidence for the thesis of the review stating that – good characterization, elegant language, really racy sex scenes, whatever. It’s not easy, but it’s certainly achievable to do a credible job of writing a positive, useful review simply by putting together the evidence and capping it off with “this is why it’s good. Now go read it.”
A well-written negative review, however, is tougher. It’s fun and easy to go kamikaze and show off – something I freely confess to having been guilty of on occasion, when I was young and foolish and untrammeled by pangs of conscience – as detailed in the last piece in this occasional series. What’s hard to do is to lay out, as a reviewer, a well-reasoned, informative argument as to why a book deserves a negative rating in such a way that the reading audience is served.
After all, that is the purpose of a review, to educate the audience as to whether a particular book is worthy of purchase. It’s not to make up their minds for them. It is, however, to provide them with a solid framework to base a key decision on: to read or not to read, to buy or not to buy. That means that even a negative review – indeed, especially a negative review – has to provide that framework, that context that allows the reader of the review to decide whether or not they want to become the reader of the book.
The framework in question consists of three parts: judgment, evidence, and counterarguments. This is not to say that every negative review needs to be or should be structured in a cookie-cutter fashion, hitting those three in turn. It just means that’s what I’ve come to consider the important stuff, the things I try to get into pretty much every negative review I write so as to ensure it is fair, useful, and in-depth.
