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.

Thank you for participating in the beta release of ReviewFuse. We are very excited to bring you the best writer-to-writer critique site that exists; however we know we can’t do that without your help and feedback. The value of an honest and constructive review is immeasurable in helping a writer turn a lack-luster unimpressive story into a compelling drama. The value of your support and feedback is just as important to us in creating a community that can have such a profound impact on the work of it’s members.

We welcome your feedback on what we have so far, but this is by no means the end of the features we will be releasing. This blog is our means of informing you of new features that will soon be released, as well as for you to inform us how the community can help with your goals in writing. We encourage you to submit your remarks/comments on any post you see here. We will read and use these comments to guide the direction of this community.

Enjoy what we have so far, but be prepared for more.

ReviewFuse Team