What I Learned From Writing Reviews

When I relaunched myself as a freelance writer, I needed a way to get back into writing and have some recent work I could show to people. Someone recommended paid reviews sites, of which there are several, and I jumped at the chance. It turned out to be a good move, as it taught me some things about online writing.

Academic Writing Style

Before that, I had learned two styles of writing. The first was the academic style, honed in countless essays through school and university. That is not much use for online writing, because it can be cumbersome. (The best compliment I ever had was when one of my lecturers looked at my MA thesis and said it was a good read, as I’d managed to balance academic requirements with talking to real people.)

Journalistic Writing Style

The second style I learned was journalistic writing. In most cases, this meant that I had to stand back from anything I was writing about and be objective. Even with feature articles, which had a lot more opinion, you were meant to put the information there and let people reach their own conclusions about how you felt.

While both of those writing styles have helped me learn to write, I had to learn something new when it came to writing for an international online audience – and writing reviews was the first part of that learning.

Review Writing Style

On the paid to review sites, what people want most of all is your opinion on a product or service. They want to know how you used it, what worked, what didn’t work and how you felt about it. They also want to know what you get – what’s in the box, if there are DVD extras and so on. They want to know whether it represents value for money.

What this translated to in terms of the way I wrote was this:
1. I addressed my readers directly.
2. I told them about the product and showed them how it worked, giving examples from my own experience.
3. I wrote in language that most people could understand, keeping sentences simple and short.
4. I allowed my personality and opinion to show through.
5. I responded to their comments about the reviews I had written.

Does any of this sound familiar? It does to me, because it could be a blueprint for good web writing. Whether you are writing articles for a web site or blog posts, this is what you need to do. So in my case, writing reviews was a good first step to doing the kind of writing I do now. And I got paid, too.

Resources
Here are the sites where my reviews are published:
Dooyoo (UK/Europe)
Ciao (UK/Europe)
Epinions.(US/International)
Review Centre