Understanding your audience

Your job as a reviewer is easier when readers care about your opinions. Fortunately, most people consult evaluations and reviews routinely, often hoping to find specific information: Is the latest Stephen L. Carter novel up to snuff? Who’s the most important American architect working today? Phillies or Braves in the National League East this year? But you’ll still have to make accommodations for differing audiences — as Lisa Schwarzbaum does in her review of The Hunger Games.

Write for experts. Knowledgeable readers can be a tough group because they may bring strong, maybe inflexible, opinions to a topic. But if you know your stuff, you can take on the experts because they know their stuff too: You don’t have to repeat tedious background information or discuss criteria of evaluation in detail. You can use the technical vocabulary experts share and make allusions to people and concepts they’d recognize. (improve your sentences) Here are a few in-crowd sentences from a review of the football video game Backbreaker from an online gaming site:

Backbreaker joins the sports design trend of placing emphasis on the right analog stick. It’s everything from your swim/rip move on defense, to your bonecrunching hit or tackle, to juking, spinning, selecting receivers and passing. You use the right trigger as an action modifier (“aggressive mode”) to go into other areas of your player’s toolset. Everything is contextual to the type of player you control and it’s pick-up-and-play intuitive after one trip through the tutorial.

— Kotaku, “Backbreaker Review: The Challenger Crashes”

Write for a general audience. General audiences need more hand-holding than specialists. You may have to spell out criteria of evaluation, provide lots of background information, and define key terms. But general readers usually are willing to learn more about a topic. Here’s noted film critic Roger Ebert explaining how to watch time-travel films:

The Lake House tells the story of a romance that spans years but involves only a few kisses. It succeeds despite being based on two paradoxes: time travel and the ability of two people to have conversations that are, under the terms established by the film, impossible. Neither one of these problems bothered me in the slightest. Take time travel: I used to get distracted by its logical flaws and contradictory timelines. Now in my wisdom I have decided to simply accept it as a premise, no questions asked. A time-travel story works on emotional, not temporal, logic.

— rogerebert.com, June 16, 2006

Write for novices. You have a lot of explaining to do when readers are absolutely fresh to a subject. Prepare to give them context and background information. For example, Digital Photography Review, a Web site that examines photographic equipment in great detail, attaches the following note to all its camera reviews: “If you’re new to digital photography you may wish to read the Digital Photography Glossary before diving into this article (it may help you understand some of the terms used).” Smart reviewers anticipate the needs of their audiences.