20151109.0610

Work continues, of course. I am a quarter of the way through the write-up I currently have in progress, and I am pleased at that amount of work, since it happened after grading a stack of papers and reading the novel to be written up. I may well be able to get the piece done today (depending on how Ms. 8 acts and if or when she takes a nap), which will be helpful. More grading is coming in, and the litany of other things I need to do remains more or less as it is. (I am contemplating a creative piece on the subject, in fact.) If I can get the job done, then, I will be the better off--and not only because of the money my work will bring in.

As I was working on the part of the piece I got done yesterday, I realized that I have something of a formula for writing book reviews (which I do as part of the freelance work, as well as occasionally in this webspace, as noted here). I did not arrive at the pattern through reading a number of reviews--I tend to avoid them, in fact, whether they are of the academic variety encountered in journals or of the literary, such as appear in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction--so I have no idea how representative those I write are. But they continue to attract favorable attention, so the pattern on which I write reviews suggests itself as being a decent one.

I normally open with an identification of the work, minimally noting the author, title, ISBN, and cost in the format of reading; for the write-ups, I include the year of publication, as well. A summary follows, outlining the major plot thread or threads in loosely sketched-out terms. The next paragraph identifies problems with the text, ranging from typographical anomalies (such as in this example) to proofreading failures (as in this one, albeit not positioned where I normally have it, but the example is early in my writing) to complaints about alignment within milieu (see here) and to breaches of credulity (as in this example). The following paragraph, usually the concluding, moves back to what works well in the text--and for the freelance write-ups, I make sure that the favorable receives more attention (demonstrated by words spent on the matter) than the unfavorable, as I have been cautioned to do, since the works I write up sell well and the write-ups are directed at those likely to find the works to their liking. (Audience awareness matters.)

Generally, the exercise takes between 300 and 500 words; the write-ups favor the shorter reviews, while my work in this webspace favors the longer (insofar as 500 words can really be called "long"). Paragraphs are reasonably evenly distributed, as adjusted for concerns noted above. And they tend to work well for what I need them to do, either communicating my overall impressions of a work so that I can go back later and treat it in a more rigorously scholarly fashion or setting me up to earn an extra few dollars for my household and family. Both serve me well.