Our Top 10 lists on digit.in and the product comparison feature have served the same purpose for a long time. No lengthy analysis, you just get the straight answer to what your next purchase should be. Take a look at The Verge with its recent This is my next initiative. Reviews and comparison tests will get shorter, videos will get slicker and perhaps, you may even have six-second Vine-like reviews. Coming back to the point at hand, I see this as a growing trend. We just left the evidence out in the open for scrutiny. We didn t use flowery language or browbeat anyone into submission. We tested the operating systems on thousands of parameters and as a result of the empirical testing we arrived at the result. Take, for example, the OS comparison test we did last month as our cover story. There has to be a via media between elaborate flowery prose (that doesn t amount to much anyway) and a simplistic good or bad verdict.
So, what should reviews ideally contain? Should they be one-liners telling you whether to buy or not buy this product? Or how about keeping it even more simple borrow from the Romans (not Facebook) and just give a thumbs up or down! The downside to this is that no one will really trust such an assessment.
The ancients weren t colourblind, the fact was omitted because it was probably just so obvious. Incidentally, someone did an analysis of the great Indian epics and the works of Homer and found that for all the hundreds (maybe thousands) of mentions of the sky, no one bothered to state even for the record that it was blue. is like waxing eloquent about the fact that the sky is blue in great detail. Against this backdrop, going into granular descriptions about what the product looks like, feels like, what it belies etc. Forget about a picture being worth a thousand words, there are entire videos put out by the manufacturers themselves showcasing their products from every angle humanly possible. Most reviews, even in print, are accompanied by at least one image. I ve always been against supremely long reviews that go into too much descriptive detail. It s the classic form versus function debate it doesn t just apply to industrial design, UX and software. How is this relevant? Well, we re in the business of communicating ideas and often we need to give considerable thought to not just the ideas themselves, but the way we convey them. Such writers believe that anything that pulls the reader away from this central idea is superfluous and should be done away with. To them the specific message, idea or concept takes precedence over its presentation. And then, there are those who don t rely on the how aspect as much as they do on the what. They could be writing about something as mundane as the types of corrugated cardboard and you d still be spellbound. 3 The Static Page A changing trend When it comes to communicating, especially in writing, there are two types of people in the world: those who are so articulate with their expression that they leave you transfixed by the beauty in their choice of words and overall quality of prose.
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