Reviews shouldn't be automatically guaranteed ratings for books or services...
Image: TheTruthAbout
Several years ago, I agreed to be a referee for a teacher heading home to the United States following a year working in my EFL team in a private language institute in Korea. Sure enough, a couple of months later I was contacted by a DoS at a school in the States asking me to comment on this person and his employability as an ESL teacher.
I was very frank in my assessment of this person, while at the same time admitting up front that we'd struck up a genuine friendship. He had strengths and weaknesses. There were some genuine talents, but also a couple of tricky issues he really needed to work at and improve.
This teacher friend of mine contacted me not long after to tell me he'd been given the position. He also informed me that the DoS had specifically told him that it was on account of my reference and the fact it was the only one she'd read that dared to admit there were a few problematic issues (minor, but worth mentioning) with the prospective employee -- alongside the obviously positive qualifications, skills, experience, and personality. Apparently, she was more happy to employ a person "warts and all", knowing what she was in for than opt for someone who had only been spoken of by previous employers in nothing short of glowing terms.
I tell this anecdote here as a reaction to recently reading two online reviews of new ELT publications that quite frankly frustrated me.
One of these "reviews" was basically a painfully detailed summary that looked like it had come straight out of the publisher's own product profile. There was nothing remotely critical about it whatsoever, nothing to show me how this really looked to a classroom teacher from a real context with real students at hand.
The other "review" was even more painful, this time because it included a similar sort of exhaustive summary of every nook and cranny the publisher (might have) wanted mentioned about the book, but also came across (in all honesty) as an elaborate bottom-kissing endeavour. Based on this review, you would think this publication could heal the equivalent of leprosy in ELT classrooms, and any teachers who dared to not buy it and have it on their bookshelves deserved to have anthrax inserted into their whiteboard markers.
In the first case, what we are talking about here is a summary. In the second case, a summary and a (somewhat less than subtle) plug.
Summaries and plugs are both fine. I've done both here on this blog before, and I don't see anything inherently wrong with explaining and recommending something.
But could we realistically call summaries and plugs professional and impartial reviews?
And does avoiding any sort of criticism of an ELT book or product in a formal review actually help that product come across as genuine?
Well, you tell me, but I can sure as heck guarantee you that those two "reviews" I just talked about did a fine job indeed of turning me off the ELT products they set out to create exposure for.
And one might wonder... Have those recommendations to "review a few publishers' new products first" (as an initial step towards attracting the attention of publishers for potential ELT writing work later) perhaps been taken either too seriously or too flippantly?
Mmmmm!
Anyway, personally I want to see reviews that have the warts and all in 'em. As with the employer of my teacher friend in the anecdote at the start of this post, I'm more attracted to and trusting of accounts that come across as the real deal, not a sanitised sales pitch in a garden where everyone insists on wearing rose-coloured glasses.
=D
