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Good day, students. Starting today, the Staff will be conducting a special series of lectures on how we grade the anime that we watch. And before you all ask yourself, “how does this apply to me? I don’t even review anime!”, we promise that looking at anime the way we do will give you a good appreciation for the intricacies involved in creating anime… and perhaps how difficult it is to create a great one.
Writing is an art form that is easy to learn but difficult to master. Unfortunately and rather ironically, in the age of the Internet where chat rooms have replaced face-to-face conversation as the preferred method of communication, proper writing is going the way of the Dodo. Chalk it up to laziness and ineptitude of the school system to adequately teach writing skills, but that is a topic of discussion for another time. I digress.
The good news for us is that there are many excellent resources available to help aspiring authors learn the tricks of the trade. The most recognizable is the Modern Language Association (MLA) Handbook, a staple in many bookstores and libraries. Another reference, though less all-encompassing than the MLA Handbook, is The Practical Stylist, by Sheridan Baker. This “writing for the lay person” guide offers helpful hints on constructing arguments in a concise, convincing manner.
Those who only stick with the laws of writing will compose technically brilliant works that are as captivating as a thesis on watching grass grow. This is where imagination is key; it’s immensely important to write in a manner that will captivate your audience. When was the last time you were in the mood for pleasure reading and picked up the manual for your DVD player? Technical writing is bland and sleep-inducing; anyone can regurgitate information verbatim, but it takes someone with imagination to throw in a dash of spice and puree it into a thick, tasty concoction. Here are a few recipes for cooking up the ultimate written feast:
1) Write it like you’re saying it. Giving your piece a conversational tone will add a flow and cadence that will prevent it from reading like a bunch of sentences glued together with hope and a prayer. No one expects you to be a great, Patrick-Henryesque orator, but making it sound like a speech pieces your ideas into one, cohesive theme. If it doesn’t sound right spoken out loud, you need to go back and make changes until it does.
2) Avoid repetition. I repeat, avoid repetition. If something needs to be said twice, you didn’t say it right the first time. Nothing bogs down good writing more than hammering the same argument home again over and over; with the limited format a review is afforded, keeping things tight and concise is of the utmost importance. Make your point and move on.
On this same vein of thought, varying the positioning of subjects, objects, verbs and various descriptors helps to reduce redundancy. For instance, “The cat is red. It jumped the fence. It ate the bird. It jumped the fence and ate the bird because it is red.” sounds much more robotic and dry compared to “The cat, due to it being red in color, jumped the fence and ate the bird.” One of the marvels of the English language (and by contrast, the same reason why it’s difficult to master as a second language) is the allowance of variation of word placement. Play with the positioning of words to create more poetic and refined sentences.
3) Start off with an eye-catching introduction. The best way I found to grab my readers’ attention is to refer to a shared commonality, like a life experience. By making your reader say to himself or herself, “yeah, I know exactly what he means!”, you’ve established an emotional connection that will carry your reader from beginning to end. Invoking a brief emotional response is key, but again the idea is to not inundate the introduction with excess verbage.
My Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust review, for example: “I remember watching the original Vampire Hunter D as a kid and thinking how cool it was (then again, I thought setting ants on fire with a magnifying glass was cool, too, so it’s all relative).”
4) Group similar ideas together. Stop bouncing back and forth between themes, lest your reader develop whiplash from avoiding being bombarded from all directions. When reviewing anime, keep your positives and negatives in separate paragraphs; this structured, layered approach not only makes your arguments more presentable, but it also makes them easier to follow.
5) Learn your possessives and contractions. One of the more frequent and easily correctable mistakes I see in other people’s writings is the failure to use possessives correctly. The apostrophe is your friend, not your enemy! Their, they’re and there may all sound the same, but each can drastically alter the meaning of a sentence. The same goes for its and it’s; if replacing the word with it is sounds odd (“the dog and its puppies” to “the dog and it is puppies”), then the correct choice is its.
6) Don’t be a walking thesaurus. While using obscure, polysyllabic words shows off your vocabulary range, doing it too often is akin to the man who wears too much cologne; we all know at least one, and no one finds his scent appealing. If you don’t talk like that in real life, don’t write like it, either. On the flipside of that same coin, do not talk down to your readers; assume they are fairly intelligent and don’t need everything explained to them. No one will respect your opinion if they feel they are being patronized.
7) Finish off what you started. Few things annoy a captivated audience more than an irresolute or truncated finale. Wrap up your aforementioned ideas in a single paragraph, and then end that same paragraph with some witty remark or disclaimer.
Learning to write properly is crucial when transposing your thoughts onto paper. Without it, you may intend on meaning one thing but end up saying another. Keep these tips in mind and you’ll have the foundation not just for good reviewing but for good writing, as well.
Anime Academy 