  Contests & Activities
This week: Reviewing is Writing Edited by: NaNoNette  
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There was a day, last week or a decade ago, that you typed "writing" into your search engine. You wanted to show off some of your poems, short stories, or maybe even get feedback for a whole novel. You found Writing.com.
On this site, you found all that you searched for: Portfolio space, helpful reviewers, encouraging groups, style and grammar lessons from peers. Nothing prepared you for the amazing bounty of: Contests & Activities! |
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Reviewing is Writing
Of course, reviewing is not writing as in creative writing. You don't have to come up with a plot for a story follow a rhyme pattern for a new poem. In order to send in a worthwhile review, you have to read the piece and think about it. You then have to formulate a review that both tells the writer what worked for you and where you see room for improvement. One of the big pieces of advice that all writers hear is to read. A lot. Reading published works is great, but being able to communicate with the author of a piece is great too.
There have been many articles written on Writing.Com about the aspects of great, good, and not so good reviews. There are so many things to think about and seemingly so much knowledge necessary to write a great review. My view of it is a bit broader. I feel since we are so many people on this site, each opinion, as long as it shows the item was truly read and thought about, is valid and useful to the writer.
What makes a good review is not necessarily commensurate with the length of the review of how many details you found to comment on. A great review can let the writer know how the characters in their story came across and completely leave out that the piece is missing punctuation. A great poetry review can solely focus on the images created in the reader's mind through the words and not say anything about form and meter.
Every writer and every reader has their very unique personal background. How we perceive a story or a poem has something to do with the literature we've consumed before in our lives. One thing that can't be denied is that reviewing is a great learning tool for bettering your own writing. I'm not saying everybody has to do it that way, but I learned many new words by having a dictionary handy while reviewing. Whenever a word struck me as strangely spelled, I'd look it up. Not only did I learn how to spell that word, but often saw different words to say the same thing. I found out which words meant the opposite.
Style in writing is very personal. Some writers like to write in passive voice. Some like to write in first person. Some prefer present tense to past tense. All of those influences we expose ourselves to as we read with the intention to review give us a new piece of information to internalize, think about, and maybe incorporate into our own writing. So my advice for this month is to grow your vocabulary and your awareness of styles and forms you want to explore by reading Writing.com authors and sending them thoughtful reviews.
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| Questions for you: What kind of review do you like to receive the most? A pat on the back? A line-by-line review? Some critical and encouraging mix of anything? |
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Contests & Activities: September 19, 2012 Issue [#5260]
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