DDD SYSTEMS & Dr. Dan Diaper. General advice on writing reviews.
Review Writing
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As an academic and as
an editor (of an international science/engineering journal, a book series and
various books) I have refereed, reviewed and marked thousands of documents over
the decades. I offer the following
general advice to try and help those who are less experienced.
Here are three things
to consider, with more detailed notes on each to follow:
2. BE BALANCED
1. READ THOROUGHLY
Always check, again,
what you are reviewing before you write each of your points. You should have at least one quotation that
supports each point you wish to make.
This doesn’t mean that you should use the quote in your review, indeed,
over use of quotations is stylistically poor and often makes tedious
reading. On the other hand, imagine that you have a strict editor,
an old fashioned traditionalist, your sternest critic, who demands that you can
prove every point you wish to make.
It happens to me, occasionally,
that I read something, make a note of it, but when I return to it while writing
my review and carefully consider the passage, in its local context and within
the whole source, I find that my initial thoughts are compromised and my case
not as strong as I first thought. This,
just by itself, might even change the whole tenor of my review. To poach from cricket, the benefit of the
doubt should always be with the source’s author.
2. BE BALANCED
Nothing is
perfect. There are always positives and
negatives. A good review should point
its readers to what is good and what less so.
A balanced review does not prevent a reviewer offering a conclusion,
they should always try to do so, but even the most positively enthusiastic
review is better for being tempered with caution, otherwise your review’s
readers will think you are the source author’s mum.
If as a reviewer you
can find nothing positive, then the problem is likely to be with you as a
reviewer. In the extreme case, reviewing
what you consider truly terrible, then your final redoubt is that one can
always learn from the very, very bad. If
you do have to say horrible things about someone else’s work, then this is no
excuse for being rude as well. I’d go so
far as to suggest that the more negative one’s review, the greater is the need
to say the distasteful politely.
Refereeing scientific
papers, the ones that I regretfully, but firmly, recommended for rejection took
the longest to do. It’s a moral matter,
one should be very careful about writing negative things that can significantly
affect other people, particularly people who you only know through their
writings.
Empathy is about
‘putting yourself in some else’s shoes’; to appreciate the different
perspectives that others possess. I
think empathy was the hardest thing I ever tried to teach my final year
students.
One can even argue that
empathy is unnatural in a visually dominated species as the optical world
really does appear to be centred on, and spin around, each of us. Arguments that successful social interactions
require empathy are complicated and not clear in that they require, at least, a
psychological double think. As an
example, in Watching Cricket on the Radio
(Chapter 8) a distinction is made between:
·
a commentator’s model of a bowler’s psychology,
or,
·
a commentator’s model of a bowler’s model of their psychology.
After this it gets more
complicated.
The bottom line
probably concerns the strength, didacticism and so forth of a reviewer’s
beliefs. Ideally, an honest, balanced
review should be independent of the reviewer’s own beliefs. Few reviewers will manage anything close to
the ideal, but it helps to have even a basic awareness that a review’s readers
shouldn’t have to put effort into disentangling the reviewer’s beliefs from
those of the review’s subject.
Empathy is difficult,
which may be a measure of its value.
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