I’m not a prolific reviewer on MS, but nearly all the reviews I’ve ever written(16 excluding this one) have been rated’very useful’ by members. And several times, I’ve been disappointed by the way some people review products.
This is intended to be a primer about product reviews. Reviews about’arty’ topics- books, movies etc are a different ballgame since they depend a lot more on the reviewers’ interpretations and biases. Also I’ve not written many of those, so I’ll stick to what I know!
First of all- do not plagiarize. Understand that this is a Google driven world-I can find any information on a product without ever coming to mouthshut.com or even reading your review in particular. You only look like an idiot when you copy paste text that has very clearly been lifted off an ad or even a review on another site. Last time I heard, MS was not paying you money based on your review popularity, so why do this?
This may sound elitist-but I’ll still say it. This is an English language website, and therefore kindly pay attention to grammar and spelling. It’s hard to take a review seriously when it’s full of grammatical and spelling mistakes.
A review, simply put, is about your experiences with the product at hand. Focus on that aspect alone, and don’t clutter your review with specifications and features that can again be obtained from the product’s website. For eg, if you bought a mobile phone-talk about the features that you found useful or not useful. We can already find out that a phone has x megapixel camera, but can you tell us what the picture quality was like? Is the battery life as good as claimed in the advertisements? Just add a link to the product’s website if it has one.
Don’t trash a product simply because it did not have a feature you wanted. I’ve seen reviews of low end phones where not having bluetooth was listed as a negative point! Why even buy a non bluetooth phone if bluetooth was important to you? It’s like buying a Ferrari and calling it crappy because of the low fuel mileage, or a Maruti 800 and complaining about legroom!
Specify all the situations in which you used the said product and justify your statements rather than just saying something is good or bad. For example, if reviewing a car, it pays to mention that you drive to work in Bangalore traffic before saying straighaway that the mileage is poor. Someone else with a less crowded commute might not face the same issue. And if you find something expensive- point out another brand with similar features that cost less instead of simply saying it’s expensive.
Focus on the product-not on the vendor/dealer. Those should be covered by a separate review. I saw a car review where the person had written 3 full paragraphs ranting about the lousy service offered by the dealer and no information at all about the car itself.
Finally- don’t write a review for the sake of reviewing, and leave it with 2 sentences. If you have nothing useful to say about the product, then don’t waste yours as well as everyone elses’ time.
Marshal your thoughts, and come back when you have some points to write.
That’s all I can think of right now.I hope this helps.