Originally posted by lex ludite
The story Janet's Ordeal and the reviews it generated bring up a very sore point with me. The initial four reviews produced an average score of 1.75. Between them the four reviewers had 103 reviews published. All had the same problem, the english was atrocious and made the story almost unreadable.
Since then there have been fourteen additional reviews, twelve scoring 8 or better; with three reviewers giving it a ten! Of interest the total number of reviews posted by this group of fourteen reviewers was fourteen! There is literally something rotten in Denmark as far as I am concerned.
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I agree that it is a distressing occurrence.

But to those of us who read and write a lot of reviews and take them seriously, the occasional person who tries this simply makes himself/herself look even more ridiculous than the story itself did. Because it's always so transparently obvious. It's as if the author had written in fingerpaint -- "Not only can I not write very well, but I'm foolish enough to think that by concocting some "rave reviews" I can fool intelligent readers into believing that an execrable story is a good one."

If someone wants to labor under the delusion that they're fooling anyone by spending their time writing phony reviews, who cares?

Eva asked "How many people read reviews before reading a story?" In my own case, it depends. If the story codes place the story within my usual realm of interest, (and it's not by an author I have given up on) I will usually try to read it (and review it) before too many people have had a chance to review it. If it has been reviewed, I will glance at the average rating (it's hard to avoid seeing it) but won't actually read any reviews until I've read it myself and determined my own grade and the general thrust of my own comments. Then I'll read the reviews, if any, which occasionally provide interesting material to comment on, and write my own review.

If the story is not within my usual domain, a series of very high scores will pique my interest. In that case I typically would glance at the reviews to see if some of the more reliable reviewers (many of us have our favorite reviewers, I should imagine, just as we have our favorite writers) had given it a 'rave'. If so, I might well read the story even though it's subject matter normally wouldn't appeal to me.


Boccaccio