If there is anything writers dread the most on mouthshut, it’s seeing for the first time what readers feel about it. It’s the suspense I dread the most... did the guys like it? Did I make sense to them? Do they think I’m right about most of the things? Or do they think I’m a bag of wind and a pack of waffle? Trust me, the wait till your browser shows up your review page and till you actually get to see who thought what about your review is the most painful wait you can have on MouthShut.

Rating reviews however is an essential part of the ’’charm’’ of this website, I daresay. It is not interesting if you write something and make it available for people to read unless you provide for a facility by which readers can express what they thought of the review. In a sense, the ’’fun’’ that we have here isn’t just becuase we get to say what we get to say, but it’s that we get to hear about what we get to say! So ’’rating’’ reviews is a very essential part of making this website fun for members.

No matter how insignificant your activities on MouthShut or activities of other members on the website are in your personal lives, it is mere politeness and, should I say, ’’sportsmanliness’’ of you to rate a review generously and without bias. Because the category hints at me to do so, let me give you some of my advice, though I would not be surprised if you don’t follow it or like it.



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Rule One: You are entitled to your rating
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This website has this concept of having a ’’trust list’’ where you can express your ’’trust’’ in some member. This is one of the many (and I seriously mean many) follies of the system here. Whenever a member in my personal trust list writes a review and I happen to read it, I feel obliged to rate it well and at least in the rating say that the review was useful or very useful.

Remember: This obligation is complete hypochondria. Never feel obliged.

What I mean to say is, if davieboy (he’s a syndicate symbolizing an arbitrary member in another arbitrary member’s trust-list) writes a review and if he’s on my trust list, but the review is stupid, then I should say it’s stupid. Not many of us do that for davieboys. Which, I feel, is being ’’weak’’.

If I write India is full of people who think they ought to shave off every single hair that grows on their palms, then you should give that review a ’’Not Useful’’ for the factual error that no hair grows on palms! Yes even if your most trusted pal wrote it!

At first some of you might not think I’ve written something worth telling you, but if you consider applying this knowledge when a ’’trusted one’’ writes something, you’ll see I made sense after all!

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Rule Two: You Rate Well If I Write Well!
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My discussion about rating reviews by people on trust lists isn’t over yet. Now my attention is towards those on my ’’distrust list’’ or those whose ’’distrust list’’ I am on. Let us use the syndicate ’’thompson’’ here for the distrusted/distrusting member.

If thompson writes a review and I care to read it, which I feel I shouldn’t have, and further if you consider rating a review an essential part of reading it, then you better ignore for that instant that the writer is thompson and rate it as though it was some guy you’ve never heard of before. Some of the members who formerly used to be on my distrust list wrote some seriously good reviews. But I did not rate them well because I was biased by the fact of who they are.

It is unfair and unjust on my part as a reader to rate someone low just because he’s thompson. So if I am on your distrust list and I write that people from your country deserve thrice as much as their government gives them then you should rate me well for doing something in the direction of preponing elections (assuming you live in a democracy)!

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Rule Three: Length is not important
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I have read comments on reviews that were very short and I found members found shortness a demerit for which they rated the review low. This is a very crude way of rating reviews. Or let me say, considering length to be necessarily a demerit is a very mediocre approach. If the review is short, one should still consider it with care.

I must agree however that shortness often also accompanies ommissions of necessary points in which case low rating is what you should do. But there are some splendid journalists here who write a very strikingly short review that contains a super saturated solution of every single thing you need about whatever the review is about.

Compare such a review with long reviews that border on being epics, and I’d rate the shorter one better because it takes a very fine and difficult-to-master skill to write a complete yet short summary. I’d go for the good journalism rather than the longish romanticism.

So the point is, don’t be rigid on your length parameter. If he’s written long that does not mean you rate him well because even a very long review might not have everything. I mean, if somebody is writing a review on a drug to cure some hypothetical illness and he does not tell us the proportions by weight that the drug should be consumed in, then the review is just a long scroll of words. Dosage is an essential part of the knowledge that you can have over a drug and so the reviewer must specify the necessary. So the long epic is a pile of nothing.

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Rule Four: Haughty Linguistic Prowess Falters Before Simple Language
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This is a rather nutty point I am making here. Consider some of my reviews. You’d find that there are a lot of intricate sentence constructions containing clause related to each other in rather complicated manners that makes it rather irritating to understand (that’s the word, irritating!). Compare that with reviews of this hypothetical member simpson who writes the same thing in a very simple and everyday language.

I’d rate Simpson more than me for being more understandable and for writing in a language that’s nearer to what I’d speak rather than writing in a language Dickens would consider contemporary. So while writing on a very intelligent fellow, instead of saying ’’His august percpicacity was commendable’’ if I say ’’His austerity and forsightedness was noticeable’’ I’d rate the latter more for having words I’d find in the dictionary!

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Rule Five: You Rate My Advice Well Because It’s Polite
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Get me?