You may have noticed, as I have, that Version 1 of our website is currently a bit dull and fairly dreary. As a software engineer, I actually like this because it has given the ReviewFuse team a chance to focus on creating a very robust and powerful peer-to-peer review system for writers. However, as a consumer of the site, I have gotten sick of the light gray, dark gray, and black that dominate our design. In order to remedy this dull and dreary look, our team has focused on creating a fresh coat of paint for our website. The new design will make our site easier to use and more fun to interact with. Here are a few screen shots of the new design. Click on any of the screen shots to see a larger image. We will have our new look up and running by the end September.

Jacob

I’m not a great writer, but there are few tricks I have picked up that I would like to share.

Grammar
This is my number one rule and I incidentally hate it. Grammar is my Achilles heel. Bad grammar always gets in the way of what I am trying to say. It ruins my ability to effectively communicate with my audience. The best ways I have found to improve my grammatical faux pas have been to read “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk mentioned in the previous post and to have a grammar ninja proofread my work and point out my mistakes.

Vocabulary
It is infinitely more enjoyable to read a vast array of words strung harmoniously together rather than the same old boring words over and over and over in slightly different arrangements. Use a thesaurus to improve your ability to put ideas together in a clear, concise, and descriptive way, but remember, just because you can discover new and obscure words does not mean you should use them. Readers want to read your work, not your work and a dictionary.

Active Voice
The active voice adds a dynamic quality to writing. Saying “the samurai thrust his sword into the devil’s heart” is much more exciting to read and write than “the devil’s heart was pierced by the samurai’s sword.” Using an active voice adds action to your story that helps your audience see what you are describing. Remember to avoid verb forms such as ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘was’, ‘were’, these all imply a passive voice.

Work in “Your” Space
Make your space “your space.” Some people like tidy and clean while others prefer piles and clutter to stimulate their minds. From the Writers’ Room we learn that Jane Austen described her writing as being done with a fine brush on a ‘little bit (not two inches wide) of ivory’ while Charles Darwin like a comfortable, private, quiet setting appropriate for a Victorian gentleman. I use my laptop while sitting in the darkened hall way of my home outside the door of my two year son’s rooms as he tosses and turns in his bed trying to fall asleep, if he can’t see me he gets to worried to fall asleep, so right now my space is dictated by his space, but I am alone and it is quiet and that is what my space is.

Start and Don’t Stop
Writers write, they don’t talk about writing, they actually write. Stop thinking about writing, start writing right now. Write whenever you can. Get up early and stay awake late to write. Write whenever you have a free second, and make free seconds everyday to give yourself ample time to write well

Jacob

Recently, my sister gave me a copy of On Writing by Stephen King. I’ve never been really big on Stephen King (nothing against him, just usually not my genre), but On Writing is a great read for any aspiring writer.

The first half of the book is mostly King’s memoirs of his childhood and development into a successful writer. It’s interesting, but for me, the real value of the book was the second half. In it, he shifts his focus to advice for writers. He discusses the “writer’s toolkit,” writing habits, mechanics, and even how to set up a good writing workspace.

One of the best things that came from reading On Writing was King’s reference to Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B White. I read this book several years ago when my creative writing professor required our class to do so. At the time, it seemed like a busywork assignment and I was just happy it was short. However, after King’s multiple mentions, I decided to reread it. What a great refresher! I highly recommend that any serious ReviewFuse member read this book. It will make you a better writer and a better reviewer. In fact, I dare you to read Elements of Style and then try and do a review without mentioning something you learned in it.

You can buy the latest edition of Elements of Style on Amazon.com

or

You can view the text of the 1918 edition for free by looking in the external links section of the Elements of Style page on Wikipedia.

Clark

James Surowiecki is a staff writer at The New Yorker who made an amazing, yet obvious, discovery. Surowiecki discovered that by aggregating information from groups, the resulting decisions are often better than decisions made by any single member of the group or even those made by an expert.* In an anecdote supporting this discovery, Surowiecki related Francis Galton’s experience with this concept at a county fair. The county fair featured a contest in which individuals were challenged to accurately guess the weight of an ox. Galton was shocked to discover that when the guesses of all of the individual participants were averaged, the resulting number was closer to the ox’s true weight than the estimates of most of the individual participants or cattle experts. In other words, we can learn from Galton that lots of people are generally smarter than one person.

Galton’s experience illustrates the power of aggregating individual opinions and sources of information to develop an insightful, accurate analysis of a situation. ReviewFuse seeks to harnesses the power of crowds identified in Galton’s story to overcome the frustration writers often experience in getting honest, quality feedback about their work from peers and experts. To alleviate this frustration, ReviewFuse puts this power into your hands by connecting you with a network of people who can provide diverse, independent, and specialized opinions about your work.

When you submit your work to ReviewFuse, it will be reviewed by a group of your peers who will use a structured framework to analyze your work. This framework will explore the development of your characters, the plot and setting of your story, the use of first, second, or third person, and the use of proper grammar throughout your work. Additionally, reviewers can add comments in-line with your story to point out examples of things they liked about your work, along with examples of items they think could be improved. For more about this structured framework, in-line commenting, or additional reviewing features ReviewFuse has to offer, visit our How it Works page.

After receiving the reviews of your work, you should plan on spending some time to aggregate and synthesize your reviews to find common patterns and themes from your group of reviewers about how to improve your work. The feedback you receive from this community of your peers will likely be more valuable than any advice an expert could give you about how to improve your work—but you don’t have to take our word for it—give ReviewFuse a chance and see for yourself!

Jacob

* If you would like to know more about “The Wisdom of Crowds” check out James Surowiecki’s book.

Judging someone’s work can be a daunting task, especially when you find it needing a lot of work. Who are you to be telling them how they should have written their story? Well it turns out you are the expert and writers desperately crave your feedback and opinions.

Many reviewers forget that they have been given the title of expert and belittle their own thoughts and opinions just in case they are wrong.

• “The comma in the previous sentence is in the wrong spot, I think”
• “I believe it would be better to use a pronoun here instead of repeating the name so many times”
• “I would think you might want to shorten these paragraphs”

If you don’t know for sure that the comma is in the wrong spot say what you do know instead. Are you right? Absolutely, you know exactly what effect it had on you and the writer would love to know it.

• “The comma in the previous sentence made it difficult for me to read by breaking the rhythm I had established”
• “Repeating the characters name so many times made the paragraph feel very repetitious. Using pronouns would have helped the flow.”
• “The long paragraphs made the story feel like it was dragging on. Paragraph breaks would help to liven up the action and give my eyes a break as I read.”

Both sets of comments say about the same thing, one set just sounds like it came from an expert. Writers aren’t necessarily looking for a grammar expert, plot expert, or a voice expert. Most of the time they simply want to know what the story did for you. Let’s face it, Writers are very creative and stubborn people; if they don’t like what you said, they will just ignore it :-d. They don’t want you to be right, they just want you to be yourself “The Expert.”

Need some practice? Critique this post, I am sure it could be better.

steve