The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews 9781441196286, 9781472593535, 9781441153098

Citation preview

The Discourse of Online ­Consumer ­Reviews

Bloomsbury Discourse Series Editor: Professor Ken Hyland, University of Hong Kong Discourse is one of the most significant concepts of contemporary thinking in the humanities and social sciences as it concerns the ways by which language mediates and shapes our interactions with one another and with the social, political and cultural formations of our society. The Bloomsbury Discourse aims to capture the fast-developing interest in discourse to provide students, new and experienced teachers and researchers in applied linguistics, ELT and English language with an essential bookshelf. Each book deals with a core topic in discourse studies to give an in-depth, structured and readable introduction to an aspect of the way in which language is used in real life. Other titles in the series Academic Discourse, Ken Hyland Corporate Discourse, Ruth Breeze Discourse Analysis (2nd edition), Brian Paltridge Discourse Studies Reader, Edited by Ken Hyland The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis, Greg Myers The Discourse of Text Messaging, Caroline Tagg Discourse of Twitter and Social Media, Michele Zappavigna Historical Discourse, Caroline Coffin Metadiscourse, Ken Hyland News Discourse, Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple Professional Discourse, Britt-Louise Gunnarsson School Discourse, Frances Christie Sports Discourse, Tony Schirato Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis, Paul Baker Workplace Discourse, Almut Koester

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews Camilla Vásquez

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Camilla Vásquez 2014 Camilla Vásquez has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-9628-6 ePDF: 978-1-4411-5309-8 ePub: 978-1-4411-9684-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vasquez, Camilla. The discourse of online consumer reviews / Camilla Vasquez. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-9628-6 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4411-9684-2 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4411-5309-8 (epdf) 1. Consumer behavior. 2. Electronic discussion groups. I. Title. HF5415.32.V37 2014 658.8’343–dc23 2013048781 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents Acknowledgements

1 2 3 4 5 6

An Introduction to Online Reviews Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience The Discursive Construction of Reviewer Identities Interacting with Others and with Other Texts: Involvement and Intertextuality Digital Narratives of Personal Experience: Narrative Structures and Dimensions Summary and Conclusion

Notes References Index

vi 1 25 57 97 137 175 191 195 205

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Fulbright Specialist program, which made it possible for me to spend 6  weeks of my research sabbatical in Hong Kong. Conversations that took place at the City University of Hong Kong’s Fifth Roundtable on Discourse allowed me to gain many new perspectives on the topics of digital discourse and digital practices. I am thankful to all of the students and faculty with whom I have had the opportunity to interact about the topic of online reviews, especially colleagues in the English Department at the City University of Hong Kong, as well as Hong Kong Institute of Education: in particular, Alice Chik, Phil Benson, Christoph Hafner and Rodney Jones. Very special thanks also go to David Gruber for sharing his insights and his own interview data with me. I would also like to thank the editorial staff at Bloomsbury for their support throughout the publication process. I wish to acknowledge Ruth Page for her encouraging remarks about the appeal of this topic in the earliest phases of my research on online reviews and Naoko Taguchi for her helpful tips about the publication process in general. I extend special thanks to James Reese for keeping me informed of mass media articles about online reviews and to Anne Latowsky for sharing with me some of the quirkier examples of online reviews. I am grateful for having many wonderful friends who expressed their interest in my work throughout the writing process: Ellen, Nicole, Andee, Christine, CF and Rusty, Chica and Joey. Special thanks to my mother, Jitka, who has always been the main reviewer of my own writing. Finally, I am most grateful to my husband, Rubén, for all imaginable forms of support, and especially for convincing me during one trans-Atlantic flight that I needed to write this book – and, perhaps more importantly, that I was actually capable of pulling it off. Finally I am grateful to all of the online reviewers who, for whatever reasons, have decided to share their unique experiences with us. In so doing, they have provided us with a rich ‘goldmine’ of online discourse to analyse.

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An Introduction to Online Reviews

Today, nearly everything is ‘rateable’ and ‘reviewable’ online. From restaurants to recipes, movies to diaper bags, hotel rooms to high-speed blenders – it is now possible to find online reviews for just about every type of consumer product and service. Over the last decade, the number of consumer reviews posted on the internet has exploded and, as a result, today there are literally billions of reviews that can be found on a variety of websites. Because of this, increasing numbers of people are consulting online reviews in their consumer decisionmaking processes. According to a major survey conducted in the United States a few years ago, nearly 60 per cent of Americans surveyed indicated that they had used reviews in researching a product or service online (Jansen 2010). Without a doubt, this proportion has continued to grow, especially as we are now able to connect to the internet with more types of portable electronic devices. And yet the online review seems to have rapidly evolved into a communicative genre that many of us have come to take for granted. In other words, it has become ‘naturalized’ (Barton and Lee 2013, p. 2). We may pause to scan a few hotel reviews before booking a trip, or skim a few reviews before choosing which brand of household product to buy, but most likely, we rarely stop to think about the numerous linguistic choices that were involved in the actual construction of those texts. For some people, online reviews may seem like a very basic, or even banal, form of writing. However, I believe that because the online review is a computer-mediated genre that so many of us read, interact with, and – in some cases – even produce, it is important to study systematically the language that is characteristic of this genre. To date, online reviews have been studied by scholars in fields such as marketing, economics, tourism, computing and information sciences. However, online reviews have remained relatively unexamined in language and discourse studies. This book seeks to address this gap and to describe and analyse online reviews from a discourse perspective. Throughout the following pages, I consider questions such as: What are some

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The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

of the common discourse features used by reviewers to evaluate a product or service? What can an individual reviewer’s linguistic choices tell us about who they are? In what ways do reviewers use language to engage their readers? What structures of personal narratives do reviewers rely upon as they ‘story’ their experiences? One of the main arguments for what makes online reviews important to study is their economic impact. Businesses have taken a keen interest in the massive influence of online reviews. One popular writer in the field of marketing claims that online reviews are far more powerful than traditional forms of advertising, exhorting business owners that ‘No amount of marketing or advertising that you will ever do can compare to the viral power of your audience as they share their experiences and impressions of your business online’ (Cockrum 2011, p.  5). Consumer reviews can be very good for business. Prior research has shown a positive relationship between review valence and sales (Ghose and Ipeirotis 2011; National Public Radio 2008); in other words, products that have received positive reviews online tend to sell better than similar products without positive reviews. Obviously, positive testimonials from consumers can reinforce readers’ faith in the quality or value of a particular product. What is even more interesting, though, is the research which indicates that negative reviews of a product can also help to increase sales. In particular, as one team of researchers has observed, ‘reviews that rate products negatively can be associated with increased product sales when the review text is informative and detailed. This is likely to occur when the reviewer clearly outlines the pros and cons of the product, thereby providing sufficient information to the consumer to make a purchase’ (Ghose and Ipeirotis 2011, p. 1510). By drawing consumers’ attention to the existence of a brand or product type that they may not have been aware of otherwise, negative reviews, especially ones that are rich in detail, are actually better for product sales than no reviews at all, lending support to the common-sense aphorism that ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity.’ Whether reviews are primarily positive or negative in their orientation, evaluation is clearly their primary function. In Chapter 2, I explore some of the linguistic resources that reviewers use to evaluate products and services and to construct their experiences as positive, negative or neutral. Before continuing, it makes sense to pause and ask: What do we mean by ‘online consumer reviews’? According to one definition, online customer reviews are ‘peer-generated product evaluations posted on company or third party websites’ (Mudambi and Schuff 2010, p. 186). Electronic-word-of-mouth (eWOM) is

An Introduction to Online Reviews

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another term for internet-based consumer reviews. Used primarily by scholars in the international marketing community, eWOM has been defined as: Any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the Internet. (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004)

In a world characterized by unprecedented mobility and growing interconnectivity, it has become very common to rely on the eWOM of strangers, which can be freely and easily accessed on websites comprised of enormous user-generated databases. For instance, TripAdvisor, the most popular travel website today, has over 100 million reviews. Access to such an enormous amount of first-hand, user-generated information was unthinkable only a few decades ago. eWOM differs from more traditional forms of word-of-mouth in a number of important ways. For instance, traditional word of mouth is usually spoken, not written, and therefore reaches a much smaller, and more local, audience. In contrast, eWOM is characterized by both scalability and speed of diffusion. In other words, ‘Information technologies enable opinions of a single individual to instantly reach thousands, or even millions of consumers’ (Dellarocas et al. 2004, p. 3). Furthermore, traditional word of mouth is ephemeral, whereas eWOM usually leaves some type of lasting digital record. eWOM can also be considered a quintessentially ‘late modern’ form of interaction, in that it centres completely around practices of consumption (Benwell and Stokoe 2006), and takes place in a technologically mediated form, between an author and a potentially vast audience, both of whom are – and will most likely remain – unknown to each other in an offline sense. Yet, this reciprocal anonymity does not render reviewers’ identities irrelevant. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Reviewers’ identities are very much of interest, and of use, to readers of online reviews. Some studies have found that users are sensitive to reviewers’ expertise, as well as to their possible motivations for posting a review (Sen and Lerman 2007; Vermeulen and Seegers 2009). This means that a more thorough understanding of the types of identity information that readers can infer about online reviewers, as well as the linguistic resources used by reviewers to position themselves as certain types of people, are matters which merit closer investigation. Consequently, I will take up the topic of the discursive construction of reviewers’ identities in Chapter 3. At the time of writing, online consumer reviews are primarily a text-based, asynchronous (and very often, anonymous) genre of computer-mediated communication (CMC). They can also be considered a form of ‘social media’. In the last few years, researchers interested in language and discourse online

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The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

have turned their attention to a wide array of social media, including blogs and wikis (Luzón 2012; Myers 2010), social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter (Page 2010, 2012; Zappavigna 2012), text messaging (Tagg 2012), reader comments to online newspaper editorials (Neurauter-Kessels 2011), online film reviews (Taboada 2011), online real estate advertisements (Pounds 2011), comments posted in response to YouTube videos (Lorenzo-Dus et  al. 2011), as well as others (Barton and Lee 2013; Page 2012; Seargeant and Tagg forthcoming). In some respects, online consumer reviews are similar to several of these other forms of social media, in that they, too, are a form of digital, usergenerated content. However, online review sites differ from some other forms of social media, because the social ties between participants tend to be weaker on review sites than on most social networking sites, for example. In this respect, most online review sites can be characterized as more ‘information-focused’ communities rather than ‘relationally-driven’ communities (according to the dimensions of online communities proposed by ‘netnography’ pioneer, Robert Kozinets 2010, p. 36). However, that is not to say that the relational aspect is absent from online reviews. On the contrary, even anonymous reviewers use discourse in ways that forge personal connections with their readers. Therefore, in Chapter 4, which centres on involvement and intertextuality in this genre, I explore some of the specific ways in which reviewers use language to carry out relational work in online consumer reviews.

Who writes reviews, and why? Online review writers can be considered ‘prosumers’. First coined by futurist Alvin Toffler in the 1980s, the word ‘prosumer’ has come to mean a blurring of the roles of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’. Prosumption has been described as a salient characteristic of Web 2.0., and sociologists Rizer and Jurgenson (2010) explain that prosumers are individuals who create value for companies without receiving wages. Thus, posting content on websites without remuneration can be viewed as a form of prosuming. In addition to the large proportion of individuals who consult online reviews, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly 25 per cent of the individuals surveyed reported having posted online reviews themselves (Jansen 2010). This statistic provokes questions such as: What motivates people to write and post their opinions in online reviews? Who would be willing to produce free content for these websites? Why do some people choose to engage in this form of ‘prosuming’?

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Several attempts have been made to answer these questions. For example, a study by marketing and media researchers Hennig-Thurau et  al. (2004) identified 11 distinct motivations that consumers may have for posting online reviews, ranging from more altruistic reasons related to helping others, to reasons having to do with expressing frustration, such as the venting of negative feelings towards a company. Their 11 motivations are summarized in Table 1.1. Table 1.1  Motivations for posting online reviews (from Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004, p. 44) Motivation

Explanation

concern for other consumers

altruism, providing advice for others

desire to help the company

often the result of consumer satisfaction

social benefits received

related to participating in and being a member of an online community

insertion of power over companies

negative comments from consumers can shift power from companies to consumers

post-purchase advice seeking

soliciting additional information from other consumers who have also purchased the product

self-enhancement

driven by one’s desire for positive recognition from others, being viewed as a consumption expert or intelligent shopper, being a ‘top reviewer’

economic rewards

some review platforms offer material rewards for reviewers

convenience in seeking redress

the convenience of complaining is important in the consumer’s decision of where to complain

hope that the platform operator will serve as a moderator

especially true when the consumer has been unable to reach the appropriate individual of the company involved in a dissatisfying exchange

venting of negative feelings

a desire for catharsis; can help reduce consumer’s feelings of discontent stemming from a negative experience

expression of positive emotions

it is believed that even very strong positive experiences may lead to feelings of imbalance; balance can be restored by writing and posting positive comments

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The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

Another study, conducted by sociologists Pinch and Kesler (2011), surveyed 100 of some of Amazon’s most prolific reviewers. They found that 80 per cent of reviewers selected ‘enjoyment’ and ‘self-expression’ as their top reasons for writing reviews. In addition, 25 per cent of reviewers also found themselves compelled by reasons related to ‘altruism’ or ‘helping others’, and for 7 per cent, writing reviews was the result of feeling a ‘sense of community’. Summarizing their findings about what motivates some of the most prolific reviewers on Amazon, Pinch and Kesler noted that while a company clearly benefits from the prosuming activities of reviewers, reviewers themselves are, in turn, ‘rewarded by recognition, status, self-fulfillment, satisfaction’. (p. 74). Although it is interesting to speculate about reviewers’ motivations for posting reviews, it is usually the case that these reasons are not immediately transparent to readers of reviews. In other words, it may not be clear from reading a review if a reviewer has been primarily motivated by a desire to help other consumers, or if instead, there may be other (legitimate or illegitimate) reasons for posting the review. A number of popular media sources (e.g., New York Times, Chicago Tribune, NPR, the Telegraph) have recently documented a growing concern over questions of authenticity in online reviews. Some consumers and businesses admit that they are sceptical of the content found in such reviews because there is often no way of knowing who the author is, or whether or not they have a conflict of interest in writing the review. In addition, some reporters and scholars have turned up websites and online advertisements that hire people to fabricate reviews (i.e., to write negative reviews about a competitor’s product), as well as businesses which provide financial incentives for reviewers to post positive reviews about their products or services (e.g., Scott 2009). The term ‘astroturfing’ (as in ‘fake grass roots’) has been coined to refer to this growing phenomenon of fake reviews (Pogue 2011, p. 36). As a result, deception detection now represents an area of research. Initial results of automated computer programs designed to detect fraudulent reviews appear to be promising, with one study suggesting that computer programs may be able to more successfully spot deception in reviews than humans (Ott et al. 2011). However, this technology is still in its infancy. In the meantime, as the relevant technologies evolve, millions of consumers continue to interact daily with millions of online reviews. As they do, they must make decisions about which reviewers they can trust, which reviews they find most useful and how to sift through, and ultimately make sense of, the multitude of perspectives presented to them on the internet. In this book, I touch on some of these issues, as I discuss some of the common discourse features of reviews that users are likely to encounter as they search for product information.

An Introduction to Online Reviews

7

Consumer reviewing is a discursive practice, whose products are digital texts. Therefore, in the pages that follow, I address both the linguistic properties and the social practices related to a sample of these texts.

The dataset: The sample of websites and reviews This book developed out of a set of earlier studies, which examined discourse phenomena (such as complaints, narratives and reviewer identities) in a small sample of hotel reviews from the travel website, TripAdvisor (Vásquez 2011, 2012, 2014). Because the goal of this book was to gain greater insights into the genre of online reviews more broadly, I knew that I would need to build a larger, and more representative, corpus of reviews of different types of products and services. Ultimately, I decided to sample reviews from five different websites and to include reviews of ‘search goods’ (e.g., appliances and other tangible objects), ‘experience goods’ (e.g., films), services (e.g., hotels, restaurants) as well as reviews of a more intangible type of ‘product’ (i.e., recipes). The total dataset, or corpus of reviews, consists of 1,000 texts. Over 160 different types of products are represented, and the word total of the dataset is around 150,000 words. Although this is impossible to verify, I assume that each review was written by a unique author. Table 1.2 provides more specific details about the dataset, including the total number of reviews taken from each website, and the average number of words per review on each site. Table 1.2  Descriptive information for the dataset, broken down by website Total number of reviews

Total number of words

Average # of words/ review

Site

Product type*

TripAdvisor

hotels (100)

300

59,811

199

Amazon

various consumer goods (24)

200

36,198

181

Netflix

movies (5)

100

11,408

114

Epicurious

recipes (22)

300

17,518

58

Yelp

restaurants (10)

100

18,432

184

TOTALS

161

1,000

143,367

147

* The number in parenthesis indicates the number of unique products for which reviews were collected. Multiple reviews were collected for each product.

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The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

Below, I provide a concise description of the five sites from which reviews were sampled for this study. I briefly present each site’s purpose and history, along with a focused summary of scholarship about each site. I also offer an overview of the site’s architecture, and I conclude each section with some comments about my sampling process and how I selected reviews from each site to include in my dataset.

TripAdvisor: Reviews of hotels TripAdvisor, perhaps the most popular website for travel accommodations, was founded in early 2000 and is headquartered in the US (Law 2006). One of the first review sites to exploit user-generated content, TripAdvisor is now a huge international conglomerate. TripAdvisor claims to be the ‘world’s largest travel website’. In addition, TripAdvisor claims to have ‘more than 200 million unique monthly visitors’ and to feature ‘over 100 million reviews and opinions’ (http:// www.TripAdvisor.com/PressCenter-c6-About_Us.html). At least 21 new reviews are posted on TripAdvisor every minute (Gupta and Herman 2011). Before posting a review on TripAdvisor, users must register and create an account with the site (or log in to an existing account). Once registered, users are given options for adding personal information in a profile: options are provided for various demographic categories, and an open-ended ‘about me’ section is included as well. The online form provided for posting a hotel review prompts users to assign a rating for the overall experience (TripAdvisor uses a 5-point rating scale), as well as to rate discrete characteristics such as ‘Value’ ‘Location’ and ‘Cleanliness’, among others, on a 5-point scale. Members can then post their more detailed personalized review text and upload photos of their experiences if they choose to do so. Currently on the review pages, there is no space provided for members to comment or to interact with one another; however, other users can indicate whether they found a particular review ‘helpful’ or not. At present, the only individuals who are able to respond to a review with a detailed comment are hotel managers or property owners. Interestingly, in the 6 years that I have been studying TripAdvisor, the proportion of follow-up comments posted by hotel management has increased dramatically. In  2008, when I first began, only 1 per cent of reviews I sampled were followed by a hotel management response. Three years later, over 10 per cent of reviews sampled were followed by some type of comment from hotel management (a trend that is corroborated by O’Connor 2010), and this includes both negative and positive reviews. Clearly, businesses are now aware that online ‘reputation

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management’ is essential to their economic survival and success. In the last few years, the TripAdvisor website has begun using what Mackiewicz (2010a) calls ‘preconfigurations of credibility’. These include descriptive labels that are conferred by the website on some reviewers, such as ‘Top Contributor’ or ‘Senior Contributor’, in addition to information about how many reviews an individual has contributed to TripAdvisor as well as how many ‘helpful’ votes their reviews have received. Not surprisingly, most of the existing research on TripAdvisor comes from the fields of hospitality and tourism studies (e.g., Briggs et al. 2007; Chung and Buhalis 2008; Cunningham et  al. 2010; Ekiz et  al. 2012; Miguéns et  al. 2008; O’Connor 2008, 2010; Ricci and Wietsma 2006; Tuominen 2011; Whitehead 2011). Several of these studies focus on the relationship between online reviews and other measures of hotel quality. Studies of TripAdvisor have also come from the fields of computation and information science, and these typically report on the development of sentiment classification systems (i.e., computer programs which automatically sort vast quantities of reviews into broad evaluative categories such as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’). The most recent research in this area has been concerned with creating automated systems for detecting deceptive reviews (e.g., Ott et al. 2011; Wu et al. 2010; Yoo and Gretzel 2009). This is perhaps because the stakes are extremely high for hoteliers: even a single negative review can have powerful economic repercussions. TripAdvisor reviews have been under scrutiny in the popular media (e.g., McGuire 2012; Smith 2013) among scholars (e.g., Fong 2010) as well as among consumers who discuss this issue in various online venues (such as on this Lonely Planet discussion board: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa?threadID2309698) and offer both evidence and opinions about which reviews on the site are fraudulent or deceptive. When I first began researching online reviews in 2008, I was interested in the topic of complaints, and I collected a small corpus of ‘Rants’. ‘Rants’ are a selection of negative hotel reviews featured by the TripAdvisor website in a section called ‘Rants and Raves’, which highlights for TripAdvisor readers the very best and the very worst reviews. I sampled 100 hotel review ‘Rants’ over a 6-month period. Two years later, I created 2 ‘parallel’ corpora of reviews of those same 100 hotels. For the parallel corpora, I collected one 5-star review for each of the same properties represented in the original ‘Rants’ corpus, as well as one other negative review (either a 1- or 2-star review) of those same properties. The idea was that the ‘Rants’ reviews were quite extreme (after all, there was something about them that had made TripAdvisor decide to feature them in a special

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The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

section on their website), which meant that while those reviews were perfect for studying complaints, they were not necessarily typical of most reviews on the site. Therefore, I wanted to balance out the ‘Rants’ with more common, or mainstream, reviews and I decided to include both positive and negative reviews. The TripAdvisor subcorpus in the dataset now includes 100 reviews from each of the three review categories: (1) the website-featured ‘Rants’, (2) typical 5-star reviews (i.e., ‘positive’) and (3) typical 1- or 2-star reviews (‘negative’). Thus, the resulting subcorpus contains one review of each 3 categories for the same set of 100 hotels. The word count totals for each category are as follows: Rants (28,868), Negative (17,720), Positive (13,223), which together equals 59,811 words.

Amazon: Reviews of consumer goods Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, began as an online bookstore in 1994. It quickly diversified and began selling other types of products online. Amazon is now a large, multinational e-commerce company. From the company’s inception, consumer reviews have been an important part of the site. However, in recent years, as the number of reviews has increased, so too, has the number of reviewrelated scandals. Most of these involve allegations of a few users ‘gaming the system’ in various ways – writing reviews for pay from the product’s company, writing ‘fake’ reviews, etc. – as has been reported in the popular media (e.g., Charman-Anderson 2012; Streitfield 2011, 2012). In terms of scholarship, owing to the company’s immense success and profitability Amazon has attracted a great deal of research from the fields of marketing and economics as well as from information science and computation. Similar to work on reviews from other websites, studies of Amazon reviews from computational fields typically involve sentiment analysis (e.g., Dave et al. 2003) or the development of automated classification systems for reviews (e.g., Tsur and Rappoport 2009). Several studies from the areas of business marketing and management have examined the impact of reviews on consumer behaviour and product sales (e.g., Chen et al. 2008; Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006; Ghose and Ipeirotis 2011; Hu et al. 2008; Mudambi and Schuff 2010). Economists make a distinction between ‘search goods’ and ‘experience goods’. Search goods are products or services whose features can be easily evaluated before purchase. In contrast, experience goods are products or services whose quality is difficult to assess prior to consumption. Whereas the marketing studies have tended to focus more on reviews of experience goods (such as books or DVDs, for example), many of the computational studies

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instead have explored reviews of search goods, such as digital cameras and other electronics (e.g., Jo and Oh 2011). Computational researchers Dave et  al. (2003) explain that while  online reviews  of experience goods (e.g., movies, music and books) may be more plentiful than those of search goods, ‘attempting to train classifiers for these more subjective domains is a more difficult problem’ (p. 519). In other words, the evaluation of search goods appears to be, in some sense, more straightforward than the evaluation of experience goods, where individual tastes and preferences tend to play a larger role. Still other researchers from the field of information studies (Mudambi and Schuff 2010; Otterbacher 2011; Spool 2009) have explored the order of reviews on the site, or the helpfulness of reviews. For instance, one of these studies found positive correlations between the word length of reviews (or ‘review depth’) and helpfulness ratings of reviews (Mudambi and Schuff 2010). Once again, these correlations were stronger with search goods (which tend to be more fact-based) than with experience goods (where evaluation tends to be much more subjective). Of the review sites included in this book, Amazon has been a leader in terms of the types of information the site provides about reviewers as well as in the interactivity of the review site interface. Similar to TripAdvisor, one must have an account with Amazon to post a review on its site. The review can be anonymous, or it can include a great deal of personal information about the reviewer (e.g., a personal description, personal photos, links to blogs or personal websites). In addition, Amazon reviews have come to be known for their ‘preconfigurations of credibility’ (Mackiewicz 2010a), which the website has been using for many years. These include ‘badges’ that can authenticate a reviewer’s identity (i.e., ‘Real Name’ ‘Artist/Author/Manufacturer’) as well as those that can indicate a reviewer’s special status (e.g., ‘Top 500 Reviewer’ ‘Vine Voice’). In addition, for each review, the website includes information such as the total number of reviews the member has posted, as well as information about whether or not they actually purchased the product through the Amazon site. Today, there are millions of reviews on Amazon for thousands and thousands of products. Therefore, my decision for selecting the products reviewed was necessarily quite arbitrary. I asked several family members, friends and acquaintances about what types of products they had searched for most recently on Amazon, and based on their responses, I selected four products that represented different price categories. For each product, I selected the brands that appeared first when I searched that category. With Amazon reviews, I

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The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

decided to focus on reviews of search goods, as opposed to experience goods, and ones that had not yet been researched in other studies I had read. So, for Amazon reviews, I sampled 50 reviews of each of the following types of consumer products, ranging from low-cost to high-cost items: tea, yoga mats, diaper bags and high-speed blenders. To the extent that it was possible, I created a balanced sample of equal number of reviews from each of the 5-star categories for every product.

Netflix: Reviews of films Netflix, the world’s leading internet subscription service for movies and television programmes, currently has more than 23 million members around the world. The company was first launched in  1997 and initially offered members video rentals for a monthly subscription cost. It is unclear when the company added the ‘rate and review’ function; however, in June 2007, the company’s blog (http://blog.netflix.com/2007/06/email-announcement-aboutavatars.html) posted an announcement encouraging reviewers to personalize their posts by uploading a photo, as well as information about managing one’s profile. Surprisingly, at some point after that, the personalization of reviews disappeared, and all Netflix reviews are now anonymous. (Nevertheless, some reviewers manage to personalize their texts in the body of the reviews in various ways. I will illustrate this in more detail in Chapter 3.) Currently, Netflix reviews are not attached to any reviewer-identifying information, such as a profile, user name, demographics, the number of reviews posted, or any other special designations. In addition, no space is provided for members to interact with reviewers. However, members can offer a rating indicating if they found a review ‘helpful’, ‘not helpful’ or ‘inappropriate’. Total helpfulness ratings for each review are included alongside individual reviews. When posting a written review, the Netflix website prompts its reviewers to assign an overall rating by using a 5-star rating scale. Films represent a type of ‘experience good’ and because film reviews tend to be so subjective, researchers in computational fields involved in developing models for sentiment analysis (e.g., Pang et al. 2002; Turney 2002) have been fascinated, as well as challenged, by online film reviews. From an information science perspective, Otterbacher (2011), in her article on review prominence, also included a set of movie reviews from the website IMDB (in addition to reviews from Amazon and Yelp). And discourse analyst Taboada’s (2011) study

An Introduction to Online Reviews

13

examined various types of evaluation in 50 film reviews from the site, Epinions. In her article, Taboada usefully highlights some of the ways in which online movie reviews differ from other, more traditional, forms of the genre. She explains that The difference lies in the audience: whereas a newspaper critic is considered a professional, and therefore different and distant from his or her readers, online authors write for each other, and emotional content and personal experience play an important role. . . . A major difference with professionally written reviews is the spontaneity of the writing. Whereas reviews in the printed media are typically checked by a copy editor, and revised by the author himself or herself, online reviews are likely produced without revisions, and posted without mediation. (p. 251)

Here, Taboada considers issues of reviewer status, immediacy and mediation with respect to audience; however anonymity in authorship is another key difference between user-generated online reviews and published reviews written by professional film critics. To create the subcorpus of 100 Netflix reviews for this book, I first selected one recently viewed film from five different genres. I then randomly sampled 20 reviews for each film, downloading every third review. The film genres that I included were Romantic Comedy (Shallow Hal), Action Adventure (Inception), Foreign Film (I am Love), Documentary (Tying the Knot) and Stand-Up Comedy (Katt Williams, Pimpadelic). The dataset, therefore, includes 20 randomly sampled reviews of each of the 5 selected films, for a total 100 reviews, comprising 11,408 words.

Yelp: Reviews of restaurants Yelp was established in 2004. Since then, it has provided a space for consumers to rate a wide variety of local businesses (restaurants, dentists, gas stations, etc.). Over the past decade, Yelp has rapidly evolved into one of the most visited websites, and the company now has international offices around the world. (More details on the origins of Yelp, as well as its corporate structure, can be found in Kuehn 2011.) Yelp reviewers tend to come from two major demographic groups: internet-savvy young adults in the 18–25 age range, and affluent, suburban baby boomers, with interests in culture and travel (Kuehn 2011; Tancer 2008).

14

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

Yelp is unique in comparison with some of the previously discussed sites, in  that the structure of the site ‘mimics the structure of a social network’ (Wang 2010, p. 4). This means that Yelp reviewers are actively encouraged not only to use their real names, to post personal photos and to disclose a variety of personal information, but they are also urged to follow and interact with other reviewers whom they find interesting – both online and offline, for example, at social gatherings that Yelp organizes for its ‘Elite’ members. The site encourages members to post reviews that are ‘insightful, engaging and personal (aka useful, funny and cool)’ and Yelp members can rate others’ reviews according to the latter three descriptors. ‘Coolness’ is a prized quality on Yelp, where reviewers (especially those with Elite status) are positioned by the website as being up to date with the latest trends, as can be seen in the excerpt below, taken from the website’s instructions for becoming a member: So what do you think? Do you have what it takes to rock the cradle of Yelp Eliteness? Then what are you waiting for? Sidle up to the velvet rope and be sure to wink at the doorman!

This excerpt offers a concise characterization of the dominant ethos of Yelp, and many reviewers seem to respond to the site’s expectation of being witty, creative, hip and informative, by appropriating this casual, conversational (and often slangy) tone in their reviews, as is discussed further in Chapter 2. Predictably, scholarship on Yelp spans the fields of economics, marketing and computation. Some of this research (Luca 2011) has shown a causal relationship between Yelp ratings and restaurant revenue. Another researcher (Wang 2010) found that ‘social images incentives’ (p. 29) are especially important on Yelp, where reviewers are encouraged to establish a well-defined social image. In fact, reviewers on Yelp are about ten times more prolific (in terms of the number of reviews posted) than reviewers on other sites where reviewers remain completely anonymous (e.g., Citysearch, Yahoo Local). One researcher from the field of communication studies (Kuehn 2011) examined the relationship between Yelp and prosuming, by considering how reviewers are positioned as consumers by the site: she analysed the company’s policies and statements, a set of Yelp review texts, as well as interviews with a sample of Yelp reviewers. Although Yelp features reviews of various different types of businesses, prior research (Luca 2011) has determined that the site is most often associated with restaurant reviews. Therefore, for my Yelp subcorpus, I chose to include

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only reviews of restaurants. The Yelp subcorpus consists of 100 reviews: 50 of these come from five of the ‘Top 10 ethnic restaurants’ in a large city in Southeast US and another 50 come from five of the ‘Top 10 sushi restaurants’ in a large city in the Midwest US. For each of the 10 restaurants selected, 10 different reviews were sampled semi-randomly. The Yelp subcorpus consists of 18,432 words.

Epicurious: Reviews of recipes Epicurious is a site that features recipes for food and drinks as well as articles and tips on cooking and entertaining. It is owned by a large publisher of consumer magazines. According to the Epicurious website, the site includes over 100,000 recipes, and its ‘members have rated and commented on almost every recipe in the Epicurious database’ (http://www.epicurious.com/services/ help/ratingrecipes). Instead of stars, Epicurious uses a fork system, and users can assign any recipe a rating of 0–4 forks. Like the other sites discussed, in order to post a review, reviewers must be registered members of the site, but they are given the option of posting their review anonymously if they choose. No separate space is provided for users on Epicurious to comment on a review, nor are they given the opportunity to rate a review for its usefulness or helpfulness. In this respect, of the five websites included in the dataset, the site architecture for Epicurious is perhaps the least interactive. (However, in Chapter 4, I will illustrate how users get around this constraint and manage to interact with one another.) Of all the reviews types discussed in this book, recipe reviews are probably the least researched. Most likely this is because recipes represent more of an intangible rather than a ‘product’. In addition, recipes are not directly linked to profit. Some research on recipe reviews, once again, has come from computational fields and has primarily been concerned with the development of recommendation systems (Druck and Pang 2012; Teng et  al. 2012), which are automated programs that make recommendations on the basis of a user’s prior selections or activities on a particular website. Beyond these studies, other researchers from the social sciences and humanities have examined reviewer credibility (Mackiewicz 2008) as well as rhetorical features (McGrane 2007) of recipe reviews. Interestingly, there are some areas of convergence among these diverse areas of inquiry. For example, both McGrane’s (2007) and Teng et al.’s (2012) studies analysed the modifications that reviewers make to the originally

16

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

posted recipes. McGrane found that the majority of reviews of recipes described some sort of modification, and she interpreted those modifications as acts of users’ agency. Teng et al.’s (2012) study corroborates McGrane’s more qualitative observations with the finding that ‘60.1% of recipe reviews contain words signaling modification, such as add, omit, instead, extra and 14 others’ (p. 3). I will discuss some of the social functions of such modifications in Chapter 3, on reviewer identities. Recipes, in contrast to some of the other consumer goods represented in this book (e.g., hotels, high-speed blenders), are considered to be a ‘low risk’ item (Mackiewicz 2008), and it is likely that for this reason, Epicurious recipe reviews tend to be considerably shorter in length than reviews from the other websites. (This trend can be observed in Table 1.2, by comparing the average review length, across the five websites.) For the Epicurious subcorpus, I searched recipes for a broad range of categories (i.e., salads, soups, appetizers, desserts, meat entrees, vegetarian entrees, side dishes, breakfast meals), and I selected 1–2 recipes in each category that had the highest number of reviews. I then randomly sampled between 10 and 30 reviews for each dish, until I reached a total of 300 reviews for 22 different recipes. The Epicurious subcorpus consists of 17,518 words.

Similarities and differences of the five review websites What all five websites have in common is their relative recency: they have only been in existence for the past 10–15 years. Another feature they share is that they all require some form of membership (or registration with the site) for posting a review. However, the five sites also differ along some important parameters. First, they differ with respect to whether they include a member’s profile along with the review (Netflix does not) – and, if so, whether that profile is optional (e.g., TripAdvisor, Amazon, Epicurious) or required (Yelp). For those sites that do include reviewers’ profiles, they differ in how much personal information they require reviewers to include. At present, Yelp has the strictest guidelines, requiring members to use their first name and last initial for their user ID, and to post a photograph of themselves. Moreover, several sites (Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp) have created additional means for members to authenticate their identities if they choose to do so: this includes ‘badges’ which reveal information about one’s status as a reviewer on the site (in terms of the length of membership, or the number of reviews, etc.). Many sites (Yelp, Amazon) also have systems in

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place for rewarding those reviewers who reveal the most personal information, in combination with posting multiple reviews (e.g., ‘Elite’ status on Yelp, or ‘Vine Voice’ designation on Amazon): These typically take the form of gifts, parties or other exclusive invitations. Furthermore, the sites also differ with respect to the level of interactivity that is built into the architecture of the review space. For example, some sites (e.g., Amazon) provide a space for users to respond to individual reviews. In these cases, readers’ comments in response to other users’ reviews can sometimes lead to a series of responses to those responses, creating a highly interactive discussion board type of ‘thread’ on a particular topic. In contrast, however, the majority of sites simply allow users to respond to individual reviews with a ‘helpfulness’ rating of some type. And still other sites (e.g., Epicurious) do not provide users with any built-in mechanisms for responding to reviews. An overview of the differences across sites can be seen in Table 1.3. Finally, the nature of the products reviewed obviously varies from site to site, and this too has implications for what form those reviews will take. One such difference is between ‘search goods’ and ‘experience goods’. As mentioned earlier, search goods are products or services whose features can be easily evaluated before purchase, whereas experience goods are product or service whose quality is difficult to assess prior to consumption. Consequently, reviews for experience goods (films, books, music, etc.) are typically associated with more subjective information based on individual tastes, and reviews for search goods tend to be comprised of more objective product descriptions (Ghose and Ipeirotis 2011, p. 1510).

Table 1.3  Sites’ requirements for reviewer self-disclosure and their provision of interactive spaces built into the review Requiring personal information in the profile (from most to least)

Opportunities to interact with other reviewers on the site (from most to least)

Yelp

Amazon

Amazon

Yelp

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor

Epicurious

Netflix

Netflix

Epicurious

18

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

Methodological considerations In the next section, I address some of my main methodological considerations in studying language in this online genre. These include issues of representativeness of data, research ethics, data authenticity, as well as the selection of appropriate discourse analytic tools and frameworks.

Representativeness The majority of data analysed in this book come from the previously described corpus of 1,000 reviews, which I randomly, semi-randomly and selectively sampled and manually downloaded over a period spanning several months. However, since I first began studying online reviews in  2008, I have had the opportunity to read thousands of reviews, and I have saved several that I have found especially interesting. Occasionally then, I refer to an example that is not part of this corpus, but that I believe is particularly illustrative of one of the topics discussed. However, the analysis in this book relies on data from the above-described dataset. One of the greatest challenges facing the analyst working with online discourse is determining how to impose constraints on the sheer magnitude of available data. At the time of writing, there are literally billions of reviews on countless websites, so it is impossible to estimate the parameters of online reviews in their totality. Yet, in order to undertake an analysis, some type of constraints must be imposed. For this reason, I decided to sample reviews from several different products, from several different websites and of varying valencies and star ratings. In addition, I tried to sample products and services that would cut across various demographic sectors. Of course, the extent to which these reviews are representative of all of the reviews on the internet can never be known; however, I have no reason to believe that they are in any way exceptional or anomalous, as I will explain in Chapter 6. I also believe that my data comprise at least a somewhat representative slice of online reviews in general. Furthermore, the central themes, or topics, of interest in this book (i.e., evaluation, identity work and self-presentation, involvement and intertextuality, and narrativity) occur in reviews found in all of the websites included here, which suggests that these are phenomena that may be relevant to any type of online review. Therefore, while my dataset (1,000 reviews) is large enough to be at least somewhat representative of reviews in general, it is also small enough to

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be analysed manually and qualitatively. In addition, throughout the book, I have made a conscious effort to illustrate each phenomenon with examples from each of the five sites to give readers a sense of the pervasiveness of the topic(s) under examination. My aim in this book is to provide a richly textured, and primarily qualitative, discourse analysis of online reviews because, as some scholars have noted, ‘close analysis of reviews provides benefits that [strictly quantitative approaches such as] text mining cannot’ (Mackiewicz 2010a, p. 13). The approach I have taken is a descriptive, exploratory one. My aim here is not to be exhaustive and comprehensive, but rather to focus on some of the most interesting patterns and trends that I identified in the data as a result of conducting close readings and various types of analysis of the review texts that I sampled. There are, no doubt, many other features to be identified and examined in further detail in the future (e.g., humor, popular culture references, e-politeness and impoliteness, and others I will mention in Chapter 6), and my ultimate hope is that this work stimulates further interest and additional research on language as it is used in this online genre.

Ethics Beyond determining how to delimit the scope of researching online reviews, another challenge facing the internet researcher is navigating the murky waters of research ethics in this relatively new, though continuously changing, online context. Netnographer Robert Kozinets has observed that the ethical dimensions of researching data from commercial websites have not been thoroughly considered. In my decision making in this respect, I have been informed by Kozinets (2010) and other internet scholars, who have aimed to establish at least some basic guidelines. For example, drawing on the guidelines of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR 2002), Mackiewicz (2010b) explains that with studies of discourse in public venues like [review sites], particularly venues in which contributors know their discourse will be archived and can be accessible to anyone, researchers are under less obligation in regard to privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent. [The authors of such reviews have] made their discourse public and have done so willingly. They know that their reviews, comments, and other discourse will be archived and accessible. (p. 404)

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The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

The AoIR also makes an important distinction between ‘participants . . . best understood as “subjects” (in the senses common in human subjects research in medicine and the social sciences),’ and ‘authors whose texts/artifacts are intended as public’ (p. 7). The data discussed in this book are an example of the second type of source. Furthermore, because the content in these reviews is normally not ‘sensitive’, because the focus is on the textual properties of the reviews rather than on personal information about the reviewers, and because (in the vast majority of cases) personally identifying information about the authors of texts (such as user ID, or information from the profile) is not included, my treatment of these data conforms to AoIR guidelines. Moreover, another group of internet scholars has stated that ‘manual, non-automated access [by researchers] of information on publicly available web-pages [even ones belonging to corporations] should be acceptable without special actions and permissions’ (Allen et  al. 2006, p. 607, as cited in Kozinets 2010, p. 150). In other words, because my primary focus is on language and texts (as opposed to studying individual people, or specific businesses), and because I use publicly available, existing online data (as opposed to data that requires some intervention on my part as a researcher), my work falls within AOIR’s guidelines as not requiring any special permissions or consent.

Authenticity With regard to more practical matters, I have made the decision to represent these texts as authentically as they appear online. In other words, in order to maintain fidelity to the original texts, I have not changed or corrected any typographical errors, or non-standard spelling or grammar. Instead, in reproducing segments of these texts, I have made the choice to preserve the integrity of the language exactly as it appears online. One drawback of this decision is that in those rare cases where I discuss automated frequency counts of particular words, those numbers do not include any words that may have been misspelled. However, since my discussion of word frequency counts represents only a minor portion of this book, this methodological decision seemed like a reasonable trade-off, especially since my goal is to examine actual language as it appears online. Given this goal, I also made the decision not to delete any off-topic posts, when they occurred as part of my random and semirandom sampling, and instead to keep them as part of my dataset. In other words, any text that appeared in my sample (whether it could be considered a

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21

bonafide ‘review’ or not) was included as a legitimate form of expression in this context. In some cases, these deviations from what is typical and expected of online reviews can actually shed light on how users of these media interact with review sites in unpredictable, unintended and unconventional ways. (I will take up this topic again in Chapter 6.) My position on this matter is that these posts are also part of the online review landscape and that therefore, they too merit analytic attention.

The discourse analytic approach(es) adopted As students and scholars of discourse are well aware, there are dozens of different approaches to doing discourse analysis. Some of the most common approaches include conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Overviews of these and other approaches to discourse analysis can be found in Schiffrin (1994); Schiffrin et  al. (2003) and Paltridge (2012), to name a few. My own approach to the analysis of online discourse in this book is an eclectic one. I believe in applying different approaches to discourse analysis that are appropriate for the given questions and topics under consideration. Therefore, I draw on insights from many approaches and techniques – from corpus linguistics to pragmatics, to narrative analysis – depending on what makes the most sense for the particular topic I am exploring. For example, in Chapter 2, which focuses on evaluation, I used the tools of corpus linguistics to help me identify common lexico-grammatical resources used by reviewers across the dataset to assess their experiences. In Chapter 3, I was guided by discourse approaches to the study of identity as well as by concepts from pragmatics such as inference and indexicality. In Chapter 4, in the study of intertextuality, I relied a bit more on insights from genre analysis and more ‘writing-focused’ discourse approaches, which some might call ‘text analytic’. And in Chapter 5, I applied different narrative frameworks to exploring what narrative features and dimensions are most common in different types of reviews. It is my belief that the use of diverse analytic tools to investigate a small and focused corpus of reviews sampled from different websites results in a richly textured and multi-layered analysis of the range of discourse phenomena that occur in the larger genre of online reviews. Throughout the pages of the book, I also show why a close analysis of discourse is needed to develop a more nuanced understanding of this form of social media.

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The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

General overview of the book Turning now to a general overview of the chapters that follow, the thematic focus of Chapter 2 is on evaluation and stance in describing experience. The primary function of online reviews is to evaluate. Therefore, Chapter 2 explores some of the linguistic resources used by reviewers on different sites to assess their experiences with various products and services. I focus on word-level evaluation such as some of the patterns found in commonly used evaluative adjectives and stance adverbs. I also consider discourse-level forms of evaluation, such as the use of slang and question forms, as well as rhetorical strategies used by reviewers, such as including the experiences of others, or providing a rationale for their star rating. I discuss the evaluation strategies that reviewers use not only to express their judgement or opinion, but also to make a strong case as they attempt to convince their readers of their position. In Chapter 3, I examine discursive construction of reviewer identities. The ways in which authors’ identities are indexed in this genre is of central importance due to growing concerns about authenticity in online reviews. Moreover, another important issue, especially when the reviewer and the audience are unknown, is that of credibility. The chapter departs from previous work on online identities in that rather than focusing primarily on information provided by reviewers in their platform-based profiles, it examines the types of identity information that is included in the review text itself. It also deviates from prescriptivist criteria previous authors have associated with credibility, such as correct spelling and standard grammar (Mackiewicz 2008, 2010b; Otterbacher 2011; Pollach 2006), and instead considers other ways in which authors position themselves to make themselves appear credible. This chapter is informed by positioning theory (Davies and Harré 1990) as well as by discourse analytic approaches to identity which underscore the performative nature of social identity (Benwell and Stokoe 2006; Gee 2000, 2011; Page 2012). I close by considering how readers might use this identity information, which can take both implicit and explicit forms. In Chapter 4, I explore issues of involvement and intertextuality. In particular, I examine the ways in which review writers reach out to their audience and connect with them on some interpersonal level. Sometimes those audiences consist of other consumers, sometimes other reviewers and sometimes they are the business owners. I also examine how reviewers make intertextual references. These include mentions of prior review texts, or of reference to various types of online or offline texts. In addition, I show how some forms of intertextuality

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involve reviewers by drawing on the discourse conventions associated with different genres, such as conversation, or with more creative literary genres. As reviewers make references to other texts, or to other genres, the result is often a highly engaging text, and one in which forms of intertextuality and involvement overlap with one another. In Chapter 5, I consider the ‘digital narrative of personal experience’ (Vásquez 2012) used by some reviewers to present information about their experiences with a product or service. I explore the range of narrative types across reviews from different sites and I propose a continuum of narrativity. I observe that while some reviewers choose to present their experiences as fully formed, highly elaborated narratives with a strong chronological organization, multiple pointof-view resources and other features traditionally associated with narrativity, others instead offer more impersonal descriptions threaded through with few, if any, narrative elements. Finally, in Chapter 6, I bring together the topics of the previous chapters by showing how they all intersect in a single review text. I point out the limitations of my own approach to the study of these texts, and I propose several directions for future research on online reviews. I conclude with some reflections related to larger issues related to online reviews, such as authenticity and authentication, reviews as a creative form of self-expression and a source of entertainment for others, and the distribution of expertise and consumer empowerment. Finally, I close with some ideas and implications for educators, such as how online reviews might be used to teach critical thinking skills.

24

2

Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience

To call this a ‘flea bag’ hotel would be an unconscionable insult to both fleas and bags everywhere. (from a TripAdvisor review) The main purpose of online consumer reviews is for individuals to rate, to evaluate, to describe, and, on that basis, to provide recommendations to others for or against a particular product or service. Therefore, it is not surprising that nearly 100 per cent of the examples in the dataset include some form of explicit evaluation. Typically, those instances that are non-evaluative deviate in some way from the primary function of the review: for example, a post which serves solely as a follow-up answer to something posted by another reviewer, rather than presenting an assessment of the good or service being discussed. (Some examples of these ‘off topic’ posts are discussed later, in Chapters 4 and 5.) However, the overwhelming majority of reviews do include at least some – and, most often, several – expressions of the reviewer’s assessment of, and opinions about, the product or service under review. Evaluation can take many conventional forms, or – as the opening review excerpt shows us – it can also be expressed in novel and unpredictable ways; this chapter addresses some of each.

Evaluation in discourse Evaluation in discourse is an incredibly complex phenomenon. In part, this complexity arises from the fact that evaluation can be expressed using a seemingly infinite range of orthographic (or phonological), lexical, syntactic and discourse-level resources. Moreover, the interpretation of those resources (as positive or negative, for example) will inevitably vary depending on the

26

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

individuals participating in the communicative activity, as well as the social context in which the communication takes place. Linguists Hunston and Thompson (2000) note that while the primary function of evaluation is to express a speaker or writer’s opinion (an opinion which often reflects the value systems of the larger community/ies that they are a part of), evaluative devices can also serve to construct and maintain relations between speaker/hearer or writer/ reader, and they can also provide a discourse-organizing function. Depending on scholars’ theoretical orientation, evaluation (Hunston and Thompson 2000) is also sometimes referred to as stance (Biber and Conrad 2000), or appraisal (Martin and White 2005). With respect to evaluation in online reviews, research from computational linguistics – specifically in the area of sentiment extraction – has offered some important insights. Sentiment analysis (and similar or related processes, such as sentiment extraction, sentiment classification, subjectivity analysis, opinion analysis) typically involves an automated process designed to classify large amounts of online data into categories such as positive or negative opinions. However, researchers working in this area are well aware that evaluation is highly context-specific, noting that, for example, ‘the polarity of a particular word can carry opposite sentiment depending on the domain’ (Choi and Cardie 2009, p. 590). In other words, no word or set of words is inherently positive or negative. Instead, it is the particular linguistic and social context that determines whether a word, set of words or expressions are to be interpreted in positive or negative terms. While the context-specific nature of evaluation is not a new idea in the study of language and linguistics (e.g., Channell 2000 traces it back to the work of Firth in the 1930s), determining ways of identifying evaluation in language has become a particular challenge, given the applied and automated nature of sentiment analysis. As one researcher explains, ‘in general the expression of opinion is quite nuanced, and the true sentiment of a reviewer might be implied rather than explicit’ (Miller 2008). Such implied forms of evaluation are much more difficult for computer programs to detect than they are for humans. Also, the distinction between opinion and non-opinion is sometimes unclear, as can be determining whether an expression is meant to be taken literally, or as sarcasm (Davidov et al. 2010). Moreover, scholars in this area are particularly sensitive to the presence of ‘valence shifters’ which reverse the semantic polarity of an expression (Choi and Cardie 2009; Jo and Oh 2011). Valence shifters change the evaluative meaning of the rest of an expression. The most obvious of these are

Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience

27

negatives and include words such as not, never, none, nobody, nowhere, nothing, neither as well as but, however and so on. In one of the earlier studies on sentiment analysis, a group of researchers investigated a procedure designed to automatically sort movie reviews as either positive or negative (Pang et al. 2002). They explained that automatically assigning a topic to a text can be a relatively straightforward procedure, because computer programs can rely on a limited set of keywords to determine the topic of a text. In contrast, however, assigning sentiment or evaluation to a text was much more challenging. They provided the following example, which illustrates why this can be difficult to do: ‘For example “How could anyone sit through this movie?” contains no single word that is obviously negative. . . . Thus, sentiment seems to require more understanding than the usual topicbased classification (p.  79)’. In this example, the rhetorical question posed serves an evaluative function; however, this form of negative evaluation is quite implicit, and therefore it is very difficult for a computer program to identify it as such. These findings corroborate those of another researcher (Turney 2002), who sampled 410 reviews from four different domains (i.e., reviews of cars, banks, movies and travel destinations). Turney found that some reviews proved to be quite difficult to classify, especially those in which reviewers used a creative approach. Consider the following film review, written as a ‘thwarted expectations narrative’, in which the author sets up a contrast and begins with a series of positive expressions: ‘This film should be brilliant. It sounds like a great plot, the actors are first grade, and the supporting cast is good as well, and Stallone is attempting to deliver a good performance. However, it can’t hold up’ (Pang et al. 2002, p. 85). Although examples such as these pose few problems for humans in determining the reviewer’s overall opinion of the movie, they do pose problems for computers because there are so many words which express the sentiment opposite to that of the overall review. This is because, where evaluation in reviews is concerned, ‘the whole is not necessarily the sum of the parts’ (Turney 2002, cited in Pang et al. 2002, p. 85). As a result, these researchers have acknowledged that ‘some form of discourse analysis is necessary’ (Pang et al. 2002, p. 85), because humans are better able to identify some forms of evaluation which computers cannot. Apparently then, automated evaluation procedures can be strengthened with a closer qualitative discourse analysis, and vice versa. Another challenge facing researchers in this area is the fact that within a single review, the author’s sentiment may shift from time to time. In other

28

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

words, some aspects of a product may be positively evaluated while another may be negatively evaluated, even within the same review text. For this reason, one group of researchers has decided to focus on units smaller than the review, such as sentences or clauses to determine what they call ‘senti-aspects’ (Jo and Oh 2011). While a more detailed discussion of sentiment analysis falls just outside the scope of my main purposes here, I feel that it has been important to provide a general introduction to work in this area because of its obvious relevance in understanding the language of evaluation in online reviews.

Overview of chapter In this chapter, I explore both explicit and implicit forms of evaluation in online reviews. Some of the language features I discuss would likely be identifiable by computational means; however some of the discourse features presented are less likely and less easily detected by a computer program. For exploring evaluation in reviews, I have found it helpful to combine top-down and bottom-up approaches to discourse analysis. I begin by using some of the tools of corpus linguistics, including word frequency lists and concordancing programs (MonoConc, AntConc), to assist with the identification of some high-frequency lexico-grammatical items associated with evaluation, which are characteristic of this genre. In order to see how these features function in context, throughout this chapter I highlight patterns of evaluation by including concordance lines. Concordance lines are displays that ‘bring together many instances of a given word from many sources, allowing us to observe the typical contexts of that word, in particular, the other words that it most usually occurs with’ (Channell 2000, p. 38). Concordance lines can be helpful in identifying frequent patterns of co-occurrence as well as learning about positive or negative connotations associated with a particular word or phrase. This type of ‘pragmatic meaning’ is often hidden from speakers’ intuitions. In the second half of this chapter, I move from a top-down, quantitative approach to a more bottom-up, inductive approach in identifying some common discourse-level forms of evaluation that occur in online reviews. Some of these include features such as slang expressions, rhetorical questions, sharing the opinions of others within the review text and providing a rationale for the overall star rating given. In order to identify these features, I first turned

Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience

29

to previous research on evaluation in other online genres (e.g., Luzón 2012; Neurauter-Kessels 2011; Pounds 2011; Zappavigna 2012), which I followed with repeated readings and annotations of my data. Undoubtedly, these types of features would be more challenging to identify using computational methods alone. Finally, it is important to clarify that my approach in this chapter is selective rather than comprehensive. Evaluation is a pervasive and multi-layered phenomenon, and especially so in online review texts, where the predominant function of the genre is an evaluative one. Therefore, my goal in this chapter is to offer some insights into the range of evaluative devices commonly used by reviewers across different review websites as well as into some of the more creative resources used by only some reviewers.

Common lexicogrammatical resources used for evaluation Table 2.1 shows a comparison of the top 50 most frequent words in the dataset of 1,000 reviews and the top 50 words in a comparison corpus: the GloWbE corpus. The GloWbE corpus (Davies 2013) is the largest collection of internet language and consists of over two billion words.1 A side-by-side comparison of the 50  most frequent words in both the review corpus and this larger corpus of online language allows us to see which words are more specific to online reviews. As might be expected, because online reviews are a genre of online language, there are more similarities than differences between the two datasets. For example, function words, such as pronouns (I, you, it), articles (the, a) conjunctions (and) and prepositions (to, of, for, on), appear among the most frequent 20 words in both lists. In addition, we see that first-person (I, we, my, our, me) as well as secondperson (you) pronouns are found in both lists. The frequency of these forms in online reviews shows an orientation to both participants in the discourse, the reviewer and the readers. For this reason, first-person references are explored in more detail in Chapter 3, on reviewer identities, and second-person references are examined further as an involvement strategy in Chapter 4. The table also indicates that prepositions (e.g., of, for, on, at) are also very common in both lists. Prepositions typically co-occur with nouns, functioning together to describe and refer to the ‘world out there’ (O’Keefe et al. 2007, p. 33), which is predictable in this context, considering that reviewers often combine evaluation with descriptions of places, products or experiences.

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

30

Table 2.1  The 50 most frequent words in online review dataset and in GloWbE Reviews

Frequency in reviews

GLoWbE

 1

the

8,375

1

the

 2

and

4,408

2

to

 3

I

3,840

3

and

 4

a

3,644

4

of

 5

to

3,458

5

a

 6

it

2,722

6

is/s

 7

of

2,461

7

in

 8

was

2,214

8

that

 9

is/’s

2,034

9

I

10

in

1,891

10

it

11

not, n’t

1,811

11

for

12

is

2,034

12

not, n’t

13

for

1,564

13

you

14

we

1,415

14

on

15

that

1,336

15

with

16

this

1,243

16

as

17

with

1,105

17

be

18

on

1,024

18

are

19

you

962

19

was

20

but

922

20

this

21

have

838

21

have

22

my

828

22

we

23

at

770

23

at

24

had

760

24

or

25

were

756

25

but

26

as

688

26

by

27

so

596

27

he

28

be

593

28

they

29

room

586

29

from (Continued)

Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience

31

Table 2.1  (Continued) Reviews

Frequency in reviews

GLoWbE

30

are

533

30

will

31

they

521

31

do

32

very

489

32

an

33

would

483

33

your

34

our

474

34

can

35

out

474

35

if

36

one

469

36

all

37

all

465

37

has

38

hotel

462

38

their

39

there

462

39

his

40

from

444

40

one

41

just

426

41

there

42

like

412

42

so

43

or

386

43

my

44

no

380

44

what

45

good

375

45

about

46

me

369

46

more

47

about

355

47

who

48

up

355

48

which

49

if

340

49

would

50

can

330

50

when

Turning now to some differences between the two lists, the nouns hotel and room appear among the top 50 words in the reviews list. This is because the TripAdvisor reviews represent the largest subcorpus (in terms of word length) in the dataset of online reviews, and it is not surprising that TripAdvisor reviewers would use these context-specific nouns as they offer descriptions and evaluations of these aspects of their experience. Other differences between the two lists include higher frequencies of a handful of words that are strongly associated with evaluation in the online reviews list, including negator no, evaluative adjective good, intensifying adverb very, stance adverb just and the multi-class,

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32

multi-functional word like. Below, I focus on some of these evaluative features, as well as their interactions, in more detail.

Good Evaluation can be expressed by using a wide range of linguistic devices. However, one of the most common and explicit devices for expressing evaluation are evaluative adjectives (Hunston and Sinclair 2000; Luzón 2012). As can be seen below, the general adjective good is one of the most common adjectives found on all five review sites. Table 2.2 shows the most frequent adjectives on all five sites. The adjective good is generally associated with positive sentiment, and as such, it is used frequently to express positive evaluation in online reviews.2 However, a closer examination of some of its collocates shows that good is not always used to express unequivocally positive evaluation, as can be seen in the concordance lines from a specific subset of reviews (i.e., recipe and restaurant) in Figure 2.1. As can be seen in the concordance lines, it is not uncommon to find not and but co-occurring in close proximity with the adjective, good. These items, mentioned in the chapter’s introduction, are called ‘valence shifters’ by sentiment analysts. They are often used in evaluative texts to indicate the opposite of a proposition. Negator not and the concessive conjunction but are quite common in negative reviews.3 Therefore, the combination of good plus a valence shifter, such as not or but, is a useful resource for those review writers who want to evaluate an experience, but to qualify their evaluation somehow. Interestingly, as can be seen in several instances in the concordance lines above, good (and other adjectives associated with positive evaluation, such as great and best, in Examples 2.1 and 2.2) when combined with valence

Table 2.2  The five most frequent adjectives in online reviews by website TripAdvisor

Amazon

Yelp

Epicurious

Netflix

1

clean

great

good

great

good

2

good

good

great

good

great

3

nice

better

happy

delicious

funny

4

great

clean

delicious

better

beautiful

5

small

large

fresh

fresh

best

Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience

33

... ly loves spicy foods. It was just not a [[good]] combination with the duck. There are mu ... ... t said “YUK”. These were awful – not a [[good]] texture, tasted only of chilie powder, ... ... the fat ahead of time. This was not [[good]] and I’m glad I cut the recipe in half. ... ... with Breyer’s vanilla. just not that [[good]]. crust did not really form and so piece ... ... daughter took one bite and said it was [[good]], but didn’t want any more. My 20 month ... ... hestnuts. Consistency and color were [[good]], but I was surprised at how bland this ... ... it to my Thanksgiving traditions! Very [[good]], not crazy good, but definitely a high ... …Food – we both had sushi, they were [[good]], not mind blowing, but solid good sushi. Th … ... but it was put together a bit sloppily. [[Good]], not great. I would go else where for better ... ... I’m a fan? This place was very [[good]] but not fall on the floor dance a jig good. I was … ... it wasn’t. My cafe con leche was [[good]]...but not great. I hate to say it but service was ... ... a good sign. The food was pretty darn [[good]] but not perfect. The miso soup broth w ... … sushi... I’m not in love with it but it is [[good]]), and we had ourselves a splurge-worthy ...

Figure 2.1  Sample concordance lines for good in recipe and restaurant reviews

shifters, is used in a gradable sense, to indicate a weakened positive evaluation, for example, when the reviewer is not completely satisfied with an experience or an outcome. 2.1 okay not great. bland except for the way too much garlic and i generally love garlic. [Epicurious] 2.2 This recipe wasn’t one of the best. I think next time I will eliminate the cayenne pepper. [Epicurious] The effect of qualified evaluations such as ok not great, or good not mind blowing, or good but not fall on the floor dance a jig good is one of a ‘lukewarm’ positive evaluation, perhaps reflecting a moderately satisfactory, though largely mediocre, experience. Thus, we can see how reviewers use qualified instances of good to express a sort of ‘ethos of the underwhelmed’, communicating the idea that while an experience is acceptable, it falls short of being remarkable. This type of qualified positive assessment may be linked to reviewers’ high expectations about a product or service. In contrast to good, the evaluative adjective delicious was used in both recipe and restaurant reviews in unambiguously positive terms, as can be seen in Figure 2.2.

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The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

…ey will still come out [[delicious]] and fluffy. After reading lots of reviews I was… ….i’m not a pancake fan. period. these are [[DELICIOUS]]! i make a bunch and freeze… ... don’t know if I have ever eaten anything more [[delicious]] and decadent and wonderful…. …too sweet. But the finished product was [[delicious]]. We did increase the chipotle but… … several requests for the recipe. [[Delicious]]! Oh and forgot, I didn’t bother to food process… ….to replace half of the water and it was [[delicious]]! Even the avowed cilantro haters… …recipe as written. Lots of flavor. Yum this is [[delicious]]. I made 1/2 for 4 people… …m and added a little ginger and lemongrass...holy [[delicious]]! Overly complicated … …robata, and ramen. The sushi was [[delicious]], and priced fairly I would say – comparable… …glplant with a sweet miso glaze) was outrageously [[delicious]]. The real reason I came… …have been delightful, with consistently [[delicious]], soul-satisfying food and awesome,… …s a good thing for this place that the food is so [[delicious]], because once again, the… …many entrees under or around $10. The food was [[delicious]] and very well presented… …fresh, healthy, inexpensive, and [[delicious]] – what more could you ask for? Got …

Figure 2.2  Sample concordance lines for delicious in recipe and restaurant reviews

The contrast between good and delicious in this subset of restaurant and recipe reviews suggests a preference by reviewers for using more context-specific adjectives to convey a stronger sense of positive evaluation, compared with the use of general positive adjectives, which are very often qualified. However, when reviewers want to upgrade the positive evaluation of general adjectives, such as good, and to signal a stronger positive assessment, they often rely on adverbial intensifiers such as really, so or very for this purpose (very also appears in the top 50 most frequent words in the online review data, as illustrated in Table 2.1). Figure 2.3 shows examples of how very    good indicates a stronger (and less ambivalent) positive evaluation when compared with the examples of good in Figure 2.1. As an intensifier, very usually strengthens the positive or negative effect of the adjective (or adverb) that it modifies. However, in more general terms, intensifiers can either ‘act to weaken or strengthen the base valence of the term modified’ (Polanyi and Zaenen 2006, p. 4). The adverb just (one of the most frequent 50 words in reviews) has many functions, and one of these is as an intensifier. The examples in Figure 2.4 show how just sometimes has a strengthening effect on an overall evaluation (e.g., meal was just gross, just right for lunch) and how it sometimes has a weakening effect (e.g., just didn’t taste right, just not that good, just didn’t like it).

Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience

35

… butter, white pepper and shaved truffle. [[Very good]] recipe, will make again for sure and i… … es I highly recommend this recipe. [[Very good]] crunchy. slightly sweet, and pretty salad.… ...stock pot was full to the brim! [[Very good]] recipe. Like many others, I cut it in half and … … entertaining! The strawberries were [[very good]] with the fruit preserves – there was a per… …Yelp’s guidance to Nami. It was a [[very good]] experience. I came in towards the end of… …shi and person you are with doesn’t It’s [[very good]] sushi, possibly my favorite in Minne… …for my bf to get seated. The food was [[very good]]...a little on the expensive side for sushi... …decently cut and, more importantly, tasted [[very good]]. The tuna sashimi ($8 for 3 pc.) … …eresting there as well. Not what I’d expect, but [[very good]] and strangely fitting. Great… …mushrooms and zucchini. I thought they were [[very good]]. She also liked them but though… …the three of us. I thought everything was [[very good]]. Unlike some other Yelp reviewers …

Figure 2.3  Sample concordance lines for very good in recipe and restaurant reviews …hesitate, though, because really my meal was [[just]] gross. I love me some Ethiopian… … ordering off the menu. The lunch buffet is [[just]] so-so. I love Ethiopian food, so I try to… … liked it very much. Something about it [[just]] didn’t taste right. It may have been the kim… … for lunch. The food is fresh and light, [[just]] right for lunch, I can’t wait to take all my … … consistency of ramen broth. The curry was [[just]] the most fragrant, perfectly spiced… … Tb in the whipped cream – turned out [[just]] sweet enough without overpowering the … … Recipe turned out great. It was spiced [[just]] right that the kids could eat it as well – I add… … so used Dijon, and it was just and it was [[just]] fine. I will definitely make this again! I… … wonderful with Breyer’s vanilla. [[just]] not that good. crust did not really form and so … … type of guy, but he thought ought it was [[just]] okay. My daughter took one bite and… … for a dinner party and thought ught it was [[just]] OK. Some people said they liked them…

Figure 2.4  Sample concordance lines for just as intensifier in recipe and restaurant reviews

Lexical chunks The meaning of any word is highly dependent on its surrounding linguistic context. For this reason, along with words frequencies, discourse analysts often find it useful to examine chunks of words that often appear together (e.g., Tagg 2012; Zappavigna 2012). In order to gain additional insight into some of the different words and structures that reviewers rely upon to express evaluation, I used a free, online concordancing software called AntConc (Anthony 2011), which helped me identify the most common three-, four- and five-word chunks.

36

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

Linguists call these kinds of chunks ‘n-grams’ (where ‘n’ stands for any given number). N-grams are not necessarily recognizable as grammatical phrases (though they can be); most often, they are simply combinations of words that co-occur with greater frequency than other possible combinations of words. Among the most frequent n-grams that I identified in the dataset were two sets of related forms: (1) I can’t wait to and wait to go back as well as (2) I will definitely make this and will definitely make this again. What is interesting about these particular groups of words is that they include some expressions of futurity (i.e., again, and [go] back). This reveals a trend in some online reviews wherein the expression of a desire to repeat an experience serves as a strong form of positive evaluation. (And, conversely, the desire to not repeat an experience is a form of negative evaluation.) Below I discuss both I can’t wait to go back and I will definitely make this again, along with their related variants.

I will definitely make this again As noted in the previous section, in addition to adjectives, adverbs are also commonly used to express evaluative meaning. Two adverbs, definitely and again, combine in constructions such as I will definitely make this again and are often found in positive recipe reviews, as illustrated in Figure 2.5. Both again and definitely were relatively high-frequency items in the Epicurious subcorpus (with 48 and 25 tokens, respectively). Three-fourths of these tokens of again (i.e., 32/48) appeared in positive future constructions such as I’ll make it again; however, the converse also appeared, when this construction was negated, ... at all, contrary to other reviews. Will [[definitely keep this and make it again]]! 6 ... ... Not usually much of a rice fan, I will [[definitely make this again]]. 80 great recipe!... ... it makes the dish less starchy. I’ll [[definitely make this again]]. And again. And... 81 ... I don’t think it’s essential. I will [[definitely make this again]]. 89 Got rave reviews from... ... with it’s mild yet complex flavor. Will [[definitely make it again]]. 101 This is a fabul... ... using less oil this way too. Will [[definitely make it again]]. 103 I make this dish ... ... my husband and me and the cat. I’ll [[definitely make it again]]. The trick with this recipe... ... tangerine...) I will [[definitely make this, again]]. 212 My family always made a mu ... ... Dijon, and it was just fine. I will [[definitely make this again]]! 277 I just joined this site ... ... children present wolfed it down! I’ll [[definitely make this one again]]. 299 What a bea ... ...with a pound of chicken breasts. [[Definitely would make again]]. If I keep a little... ...added only onions in the beginning. [[Definitely a soup I will make again]]! 132 Great...

Figure 2.5  Selected concordance lines for definitely  again in recipe reviews

Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience

37

... am a happy camper). I can’t wait to go [[back]] and saddle up to bar and blissfully slu ... ... ly worth the money. I can’t wait to go [[back]] and try some more of the vegetarian dis ... ... derful. I’m looking forward to going [[back]], especially after reading some of the o ... ... including tip. Looking forward to go [[back]]! 88 You know, I’ve always sort of overl ... ... ight of evening. I would definitely go [[back]] for this dish! We also tried a cou ... ... bento boxes though. So I am going to go [[back]] and try one, and maybe I’ll write anoth ... ... aurants in Minnesota. I’ll certainly be [[back]], and look forward to trying more of the ... ... ‘t order it. I am definitely coming [[back]] to order the sushi and more of the roba ... ... in Minneapolis for sushi and I’ll come [[back]] again the next time I’m in town. 80 ... ... all to bring a group too but I would be [[back]] for a date or two. The major drawback ... ... y really know their shit. I will be [[back]], and not just for happi awaa. 89 Ge ... ... e reasonably priced too. I will be [[back]]. 92 Wakame? more like Walk Away. We ... ... eet and the sauces were good. I may be [[back]] for some noodle salad. 3 Came here for ... ... 05 salad. Truth. A salad would bring me [[back]]. We went to Columbia for dinner on V ... ... to get my soda... I think I’ll come [[back]] and try ordering off the menu. The lunch buffet ... ... e of things to try. I’ve got to go [[back]], after reading some of the reviews. I should give ... ... used to in Raleigh, but I would not go [[back]] to this restaraunt. 35 This was a delic ... ... ore to be said. We probably won’t be [[back]] for lunch again. 97 With all the buzz ... ... n the service department, I will not be [[back]]. There are too many other places that h ...

Figure 2.6  Selected concordance lines for back in restaurant reviews

as in I won’t make it again. Often, these expressions of futurity appear either very close to the beginning or near the end of a review, and function as an overall assessment of the recipe. (Numbers appearing in angle brackets in Figures 2.5 and 2.6 indicate the start of a new review.) Position in reviews is important, because opening or closing sentences often function as summaries of the entire review and accordingly, ‘comments at the very beginning or very end of a review are accorded more weight than remarks in less prominent positions’ (Polanyi and Zaenen 2004, p. 9). In the Epicurious dataset, it is interesting to note that the stance adverb definitely only combined with the positive will make and never appeared with will not make, as is illustrated in the above concordance lines. Definitely and other stance adverbs will be discussed in greater detail later in the chapter.

I can’t wait to go back Similar to the ways in which again functions as an evaluative device in recipe reviews, the chunk wait to go back sheds light on an analogous phenomenon

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

38

occurring in restaurant and hotel reviews. For example, in the Yelp reviews, there were 25 instances of the spatio-temporal adverb back combined with verbs such as go, come and be. Conveying a sense of anticipatory repetition that is similar to again in recipe reviews, verb  back constructions in restaurant and hotel reviews provide another example of how an adverb is used as a form of evaluation in signalling the desire or plan on the part of the reviewer to repeat the experience. As the first lines of Figure 2.6 show, can’t wait to go back is one of these common constructions. Related constructions with similar meanings include look(ing) forward to go(ing) back and I will be/I am coming back. Once again, as can be seen in the final concordance lines in Figure 2.6, back also appears when reviewers vow to never return to a place (e.g., will not go back, will never go back), as an expression of negative evaluation. The construction can’t wait to go back also appeared in hotel reviews. The example below appeared as the final line of a hotel review. 2.3 Can’t wait to go back!!!! [TripAdvisor] For the hospitality industry in particular, expressing a desire to return for a repeat experience to a specific restaurant or hotel is clearly a way for customers to indicate their positive evaluation. Although (go) back and related forms are most commonly found in reviews of service experiences, they also appear as the final statements in some product reviews: for example, in a review of a yoga mat (2.4) and in a review of highspeed blender (2.5). 2.4 . . . the best mats that I have seen, and I will never go back to using anything else. [Amazon] 2.5 . . . this blender. Once you’re spoiled, you may not go back to a cheap low power one. [Amazon] Here, the expression go back is used a bit differently, in explaining that the reviewed product is so superior to that of a competitor’s brand that, once purchased, it is unlikely that the reviewer (or other consumers) will return to a previously used product.

Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience

39

This section has drawn attention to the fact that certain adverbs – and interestingly, some of which are not conventionally associated with evaluation (e.g., again and back) – appear in a set of related constructions, forming part of reviewers’ repertoire of productive evaluative strategies. Furthermore, these expressions of evaluation are often specific to the nature of the product being reviewed. Constructions such as will definitely make again appear mostly in recipe reviews, whereas go/come/be back appears most often in restaurant and hotel reviews and less frequently in product reviews.

Stance adverbs A set of adverbs that are more conventionally associated with evaluation are called stance adverbs, and their primary role is to convey subjective information. According to Biber et al. (1999), stance adverbs fall into three major semantic subcategories which are presented in Figure 2.7. Below, I discuss the most frequently occurring adverb for each of these three subcategories in online reviews. These are definitely, unfortunately and literally, respectively. It is important to mention that when I compared overall frequencies of stance adverbs in online reviews to frequencies of stance adverbs previously found in conversation (Biber et  al. 1999), I noted a number of similarities. First, I found that reviews, like conversation, feature a high proportion of adverbs that express opinion and attitude.4 More specifically, adverbs expressing epistemic stance (e.g., probably, maybe, perhaps, of course, certainly) appear with comparable frequency in online reviews as they do in conversation. However, one difference that I found was that the most frequent epistemic stance adverb in online reviews, definitely, was six times more common in online reviews compared with conversation.5 This may not come as a surprise, especially since we saw in the previous section that definitely occurred quite frequently in recipe reviews, in constructions such as will definitely make this again. But definitely

Epistemic adverbs express the speaker’s judgment about the certainty, reliability, and limitations of the proposition. Attitude adverbs convey the speaker’s feelings, attitude or value judgment about a proposition. Style adverbs describe the manner of speaking.

Figure 2.7  Major subcategories of stance adverbs (from Biber et al. 1999, pp. 557–8)

40

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

appears in many other combinations as well. The high frequency of definitely in this particular context makes sense, given the core meaning of definitely as marker of certainty, and given that some of the major purposes of online reviews are to express opinions and to persuade others. As was illustrated earlier in Figure 2.5 (which showed how definitely co-occurred with will make again), the adverb definitely, which indicates a reviewer’s commitment to a proposition, is a common feature that reviewers use when they want to emphasize their assessments of a particular experience. For example, in the concordance lines in Figure 2.8 from TripAdvisor reviews, definitely appears in close proximity to again or back, highlighting the reviewer’s commitment to a future-oriented claim. Definitely also appears often with specific recommendations, as can be seen in the concordance lines in Figure 2.9 from several different types of reviews. Again, the function of definitely in these examples marks the reviewer’s recommendation as emphatic. …and to dinner right on the river. I would [[definitely]] stay here again if I ever get back to... …great choice of food and cocktails. Would [[definitely]] stay there again if we went back. … … my husband to do some work. I would [[definitely]] stay at this property again. 10 … …satisfy you for 1 or 4 nights. I will [[definitely]] go and stay there again and can warmly… … friendly. Our room was great! We [[definitely]] will stay here again when we come back… …and my son loved it. I would [[definitely]] go back. The flight was with Monarch which … …nothing – Gilbert’s worked well for that. We’ll [[definitely]] be coming back when we … …was approximately $33. Overall, I would [[definitely]] come back here. The hotel is…

Figure 2.8  Selected concordance lines for definitely  again/back from hotel reviews

…and just eat what he fancied so I would [[definitely]] recommend going for the breakfast … …desk staff were friendly and helpful. I would [[definitely]] recommend staying at the Bell… …there is a night club below but otherwise I would [[definitely]] recommend it. Its such a … …roblems sliding on sweaty hands and feet, I would [[definitely]] recommend this mat. 9 … …by our new friend, homemade sangria. I’d [[definitely]] recommend a trip to Colu… …is a first timer at this type of food, I [[definitely]] recommend ordering the Queen’s Eight… …Absolutely beautiful. Romantic. Sad. I will [[definitely]] recommend it and will see it again… …and the gay rights movement draws many parallels. [[Definitely]] worth your rental. 3 … …or sinful can hold the rest of us hostage. [[Definitely]] worth watching (unless perhaps you…

Figure 2.9  Selected concordance lines for definitely occurring with recommendations

Evaluation and Stance in Describing Experience

41

In constructions such as these, definitely expresses the reviewer’s unambiguous conviction about, and commitment to, that which she/he is proposing. Another trend that appeared across the dataset was the use of definitely to modify adjectives. This use of definitely is a more recent development in English and it is associated with informal registers (Simon-Vandenbergen 2008). When definitely precedes adjectives, it has an intensifying function (Aijmer 2008) similar to that of very or really, as can be seen in Figure 2.10. In online reviews, epistemic adverbs (such as definitely, as well as probably, maybe, etc.) are about five times as frequent as attitude adverbs (e.g., fortunately, luckily, predictably), and these proportions are similar to those found in conversation (Biber et al. 1999). For the second subcategory of attitude adverbs, unfortunately occurred most frequently across all review websites. Also, as seen below, in all but one instance, unfortunately occurred sentence-initially. This pattern highlights its secondary function as a linking adverbial, that is, as a transition between two sentences. While the primary function of adverbs such as unfortunately is as a marker of stance (i.e., expressing the writer’s comment on the content or style of the sentence in which it appears), their secondary function is often that of a linking adverbial connecting two clauses (Biber and Conrad 2000). As the concordance lines in Figure 2.11 illustrate, in online reviews, unfortunately is often used to set up an expectation contrast. In these cases, its primary function is to preface experiences or states that run counter to expectations, or to deny the positive expectations set up by the preceding text (Thompson and Zhou 2000). In fact, reviewers often report on a match or mismatch between their expectations and reality (Vásquez 2011). This was often the case with reviewers who expressed disappointment or dissatisfaction with a service experience, or …for people with walking difficulties and [[definitely]] not suitable for wheelchairs as … …view cost us $220 a night in mid-winter. [[Definitely]] over priced but one amenity was … … themed diaper bag on my shoulder. This bag is [[definitely]] brown, cream and bright … …style diaper bag, for example). This bag is [[definitely]] on the small side for a diaper… …had problems on other mats. The Jade mat is [[definitely]] stickier, but it does still slip a… …a tea; this is a tasty way to do so. I am [[definitely]] impressed with this tea and with … …vable. I kept sneaking tastes of it. The broth is [[definitely]] Japanese curry flavored, but … …others. I like the skewers of meat. The pork was [[definitely]] delicious. The chicken is… …to eat between the two of us, and were [[definitely]] satisfied. The best thing about this …

Figure 2.10  Selected concordance lines for definitely  ADJ

The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews

42

... otion, stay two times get a night free. [[Unfortunately]], there is no way i will stay there agai ... ... bs were scattered throughout the floor. [[Unfortunately]] the so-so and overpriced food did ... ... general ambience of the ground floor. [[Unfortunately]] that is where it stopped! Check in... ... of people who stayed here in the past. [[Unfortunately]] the past is the past and the place... ... and the heater was mercifully quiet. [[Unfortunately]], the closer I looked at things the... ... clean soap scum built up in the shower. [[Unfortunately]], this was the only hotel in town ... ... were in Lexington for a wedding, and [[unfortunately]] the Marriott where the wedding took... ...we’re hoping to share one giant dish. [[Unfortunately]] the paella has shrunk in size with the ... ... they could appreciate inner beauty. [[Unfortunately]], society is totally focused on the outs ... ... reasonable price/power and great looks. [[Unfortunately]], my first smoothie was a disaster... ... opening into which a clear insert goes. [[Unfortunately]] the insert, which protrudes above ... ... Hop bag and happily placed my order. [[Unfortunately]], it really isn’t a five or even a four ... ... reviews others had given to the bag. [[Unfortunately]], it wasn’t quite as nice as I had antic ... ... cheap Gaia mat from Target to this one. [[Unfortunately]], the first time I used it in class ... ... e calling this company quits. [[Unfortunately]], I have to agree with another review. T ... ... ful that this Rishi Tea was the answer. [[Unfortunately]], this tea leaves a little to be desired ...

Figure 2.11  Selected concordance lines for unfortunately in all reviews

with a product they had ordered. Besides unfortunately, reviewers’ expectations and assumptions were expressed in other ways as well: for example, indirectly through the use of modals such as should (as in Example 2.6) or more explicitly, through reference to expectations or disappointment (as in Examples 2.7 and 2.8). The following excerpts come from different Amazon reviews of diaper bags. 2.6 a diaper bag should be durable, this one tore just days after having it [Amazon] 2.7 We were expecting a softer more supple nylon, similar to the nylon in higher end REI or LL Bean Gear (I mean, for the price we think the expectation was reasonable!) Instead the material is a stiff thin nylon. . . . [Amazon] 2.8 I’m so disappointed, the search continues for that perfect diaper bag. [Amazon] Example 2.8 indicates that, on occasion, references to a reviewer’s disappointment may be linked to an expectation of perfection. In this case, the comment reveals

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43

the reviewer’s belief that ‘the perfect bag’ exists, and one simply needs to continue searching in order to discover it. These types of expressions of evaluation may also provide some insights into consumer beliefs and behaviours. What I mean by this more specifically is that it is interesting to consider how such discourses (Example 2.8) help to reproduce ideologies of consumption, as well as actual purchasing practices that are based on those ideologies. Returning to the focus on adverbs in this section, the final sub-category of stance adverbs is style adverbs (e.g., seriously, honestly) which tend to be less frequent in online reviews than epistemic and attitude adverbs, just as they are in conversation. The most frequent style adverb in online reviews is the adverb literally. Similar to the function of definitely, this particular style adverb helps to persuade the reader of some proposition. As is the case of definitely, the adverb literally is also currently undergoing a process of semantic change, wherein its literal meaning is being replaced with a more expressive function (Israel 2002). In this sense, literally is also somewhat similar in function to intensifiers such as really. In examples such as the ones above, the primary function of literally seems to be to emphasize a reviewer’s commitment to the utterance meaning. It is especially interesting to observe that, in the last two lines of Figure 2.12, the adverb literally appears as a standalone unit, syntactically apart from the preceding sentence, behaving much like a discourse marker or interjection, which provides further evidence of the aforementioned semantic change in progress.

... certainly not tourists friendly, it is [[literally]] in the middle of nowhere!! The room ... ... elevator and pressed the “8” button it [[literally]] took tens of seconds (an eternity with ... ... travel can be good or bad, in truth you [[literally]] would do better with a bottle of vodka ... ... to Rome during the peak time, and there [[literally]] was no where else to go. The final mor ... ... and holes in the corridor walls. It [[literally]] felt like we were staying in a jail cel ... ... The eggplants skin was so chewy that I [[literally]] sat, just chewing one piece for about a ... ... ormous as well. The slices of cake can [[literally]] be shared by 4 people! The dessert sel ... ... at here often like my parents. They’ve [[literally]] gotten several free meals here with the ... ... the the ice crush button and this mode [[literally]] makes snow; not just crushed ice, but s ... ... n front of it (or within 30 feet) you’d [[literally]] have to use ear plugs, and family membe ... ... vator with a new outlook on the world…[[literally]]. Hal is only able to see the inner beau ... ... The lobby of the hotel is hot as hell...[[literally]]. They do not have any cooling system in ...

Figure 2.12  Selected concordance lines for literally in all reviews

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Discourse-level evaluation strategies In the previous section, I explored some frequent patterns of evaluation occurring at the word or phrase level. I now turn to other, discourse-level evaluation strategies used by reviewers, such as the use of slang, interjections, rhetorical questions, present-tense declarative statements, references to the assessments of others and justification of the star rating given. These features were identified inductively, through my repeated readings of reviews and observations of their occurrence throughout the dataset, and were informed by prior studies of evaluation in discourse.

Use of slang Slang, generally considered to be ‘non-standard’ or colloquial language, is used by some reviewers to overtly signal evaluation. As Zappavigna has pointed out in her discourse analytic work on Twitter (2012), slang proliferates in online environments. Where online reviews are concerned, I have found that, in general, slang is more common on some sites (e.g., Yelp, Netflix) and less common on others (e.g., TripAdvisor, Amazon, Epicurious). In fact, slang expressions were found much more frequently in Yelp reviews than in any of the other websites, which is likely related to the fact that ‘coolness’ is stressed as a core value of the site. Slang is typically associated with the discourse style of young people, so the use of colloquial language, no doubt, contributes to a sense of ‘coolness’ on a site where reviewers are discursively constructed as trendsetters. (Not surprisingly, I  observed that many of the reviews which included slang expressions did, in fact, receive ratings of ‘cool’ by other Yelp readers.) As a result, in the brief discussion of slang below, I focus on examples from Yelp reviews, where slang is most predominant. Earlier, I noted that qualified instances of good in online reviews often express an ‘ethos of the underwhelmed’, communicating that idea that while an experience may be acceptable, it falls short of being remarkable. The slang item meh is another lexical expression of this sensibility. Meh is used frequently in internet language to indicate indifference or mediocrity (Jones et al. 2011). This item appeared 6 times in 100 Yelp reviews, as shown in the following examples. The concordance lines in Figure 2.13 show that meh is often used as a predicative adjective, that it is sometimes pre-modified (with intensifiers such as very or pretty) and that it also sometimes occurs as a stand-alone interjection.

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... atch me. The pork ribs were just kinda [[meh]] – it said they were supposed to be glaz ... ... icy vinagrette dressing. Service was [[meh]]....the waiter brought out things as the ... ... hem home. The dipping sauce was pretty [[meh]], not a ton of flavour and not spicy as ... ... a decent deal. It came with miso soup ([[meh]]), salad (swimming in a pool of dressing ... ... didn’t taste or smell particularly fresh... [[meh]]... Wontons ($9.25) – Deep fried crea ... ... nt to go out with a special someone. [[Meh]]. There are so many better places for s ...

Figure 2.13  Concordance lines for meh in Yelp restaurant reviews

Besides meh, reviewers use other slang expressions to indicate evaluation. In the following examples, the slang expression, whatever, is used as an interjection and is used to convey a sense of indifference or nonchalance, similar to meh. However, in Yelp reviews whatever is typically used as an evaluative response to a service encounter, rather than as an assessment of the food. 2.9 For the first time in a very long time, I feel the sting of dining alone. Everyone else dined in couples, or groups. Before this day, this had never really bothered me. Yeah, I’m alone, so what? I brought a magazine! Whatever, I wasn’t there to make best friends with the hostess. [Yelp] 2.10 He would be laughing and smiling with the other tables he was servicing and was really short with us. Whatever. [Yelp] Of course, slang can also be used to express positive evaluation, as seen in the instance below, in which the colloquialism the bomb is used as a superlative, synonymous with ‘the best’. 2.11 Okay, let’s start off with the food, we got the following: House Special Salad – This salad is the bomb – it’s very intense.. if you cannot handle intense flavors this salad is not for you. . . . [Yelp] Interestingly, expletives were more often used to indicate positive rather than negative assessment, as can be seen in the following excerpts. 2.12 The waitstaff is also, shockingly, Japanese. Most gringo sushi joints are just that . . . gringo-ful. But they really know their shit. [Yelp]

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2.13 Yes, it’s true, this is the first Ethiopian restaurant I’ve ever tried, but – oh my goodness – it was SO cool. Four reasons why this place is so ballin’. . . . [Yelp] 2.14 Was it worth 4.99? Hells to the yeah. [Yelp] As can be seen, reviewers use a range of slang expressions to express evaluation – in some cases, to signal indifference or mediocrity, and in others, to express praise or approval.

Interjections Similar to slang, interjections often convey affect and sentiment. It is common for interjections to appear as evaluative devices in various genres of asynchronous CMC (Neurauter-Kessels 2011), and online reviews are no exception. Interjections appeared on all five review sites in the dataset. Some interjections, such as yuck, yikes, sheesh were used to express negative sentiment, while others such as yum and yippee clearly expressed positive sentiment. Among the most frequent interjections, wow was used by reviewers to express surprise, and it appeared on all of the websites. As the examples below show, wow can be used to express either positive or negative evaluation. 2.15 Wow! This was outstanding and so easy to prepare! [Epicurious] 2.16 We went ahead and got a room. WOW the place was clean. . . . [TripAdvisor] 2.17 Wow, this one is REALLY bad . . . had to force myself to finish watching it. [Netflix] 2.18 Wow! what an overpowering rubber smell. I washed it twice but am still having a hard time using it. [Amazon] Examples such as these show that interjections (e.g., wow, yeah) indicate that some expression of affect is being made, even when the semantic valence of that expression (i.e., whether it is positive or negative) is not

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immediately obvious. Therefore, interjections often require more context for their interpretation as an expression of positive or negative sentiment. Interjections also lend a more informal, conversational tone to the review, thus contributing to involvement in discourse, a topic that will be taken up in Chapter 4.

Rhetorical questions As was briefly illustrated in the chapter’s introduction, rhetorical questions provide a form through which reviewers can offer an indirect assessment of some aspect of the product or service being discussed. Like interjections, rhetorical questions also create a sense of involvement for readers of reviews. It has been noted that, in some online genres, rhetorical questions often function as indirect accusations (Neurauter-Kessels 2011). As can be seen in the examples below, the overall tone of such questions in online reviews often seems to be one of incredulity. 2.19 $400 for a blender?. . . . Foamy asparagus soup?. . . . Isn’t the point to get more fiber? [Amazon] 2.20 Why bother? I mean where is the fiz and pizzaz? [Epicurious] 2.21 What responsible event manager leaves her property while three events are taking place simultaneously? [TripAdvisor] As Examples 2.19 and 2.20 illustrate, sometimes several rhetorical questions appear in close proximity to one another, for added emphasis.

Declarative present-tense statements Declarative present-tense statements are another form of implicit evaluation. As one internet language scholar points out, declarative present-tense statements (e.g., this newspaper has no respect for its readers) create an impression of indisputableness (Neurauter-Kessels 2011). Example 2.22 shows that these types of statements sometimes co-occur with superlatives.

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2.22 This is one of the best mats on the market. [Amazon] 2.23 Duck needs to be challenged by its sauce. That’s why you never see Duck In A Light White Wine Sauce. [Epicurious] As is clear from the above examples, besides evaluating a product, constructions such as these also communicate an implied sense of authority or expertise on the part of the writer, a topic which is taken up in more detail in Chapter 3, on reviewer identities.

Including the assessments of others Another discourse-level strategy used by reviewers to evaluate a product is including mention of the assessments of others (family members, friends, etc.) who shared the experience with the reviewer. This rhetorical device was observed most frequently in recipe, restaurant and movie reviews. In recipe reviews, one out of every three reviewers makes a reference to others’ reactions to a dish. One common way of referencing evaluation from others is through the use of the word review(s), most often preceded by positive adjectives such as great or rave, as seen in the concordance lines below in Figure 2.14. (Note that this use of reviews related to the finished recipe product differs from those uses of reviews which reference the textual reviews found on the same website. The latter phenomenon is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, on Intertextuality.) Another word which appears frequently with positive appraisal in recipe reviews is the mass noun guests, often occurring in combination with verbs associated with approval, such as raved, loved, liked, ate – as can be seen in the concordance lines below in Figure 2.15. ... definitely make this again. Got rave [[reviews]] from guests. Served with pecan encruste ... ... afternoon. At both, this salad got rave [[reviews]]. Even people who do not normally like s ... ... iner and shook it. This salad got great [[reviews]]. The key to using fennel in salads a ... ... four different groups and it gets great [[reviews]] with adults and older kids. It will mak ... ... our Seder dinner, and it received rave [[reviews]] from everyone. I used only 1/2 cup of o ... ... time today since it met with such good [[reviews]] from guests last weekend. I agree with ... ... nd i serve a version of this to acclaim [[reviews]] at this time of year with yakima valley ...

Figure 2.14  Selected concordance lines for reviews in recipe reviews

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... along with some chipotle cream, and the [[guests]] always rave. I loved these! The comb ... ... sgiving appetizer, and all of the other [[guests]] raved about them and asked for the reci ... ... dian Vegetable Curry from this site, my [[guests]] loved the combo. I toasted the coconut ... ... lower and potato (on epicurious) and my [[guests]] loved everything. The combination of fa ... ... were very pleased with the outcome. Our [[guests]] loved it and so did we. I am glad I fou ... ... the standard, but tweaked a little. My [[guests]] all loved it too. I forgot to get the p ... ... only lovely, but very flavorful and the [[guests]] loved it. I will keep this one for futu ... ... with baked polenta. It was good and our [[guests]] liked it. I simmered the lamb stew meat ... ... y..i thought it was fabulous as did the [[guests]]...the flavors are subtle and each layer ...

Figure 2.15  Selected concordance lines for guests in recipe reviews

The fact that some reference to the reaction of others appears in nearly 1/3 of the reviews of recipes (i.e., 98/300) indicates that it is an extremely productive discursive resource for communicating the relative success of a particular recipe. Besides guests, other individuals mentioned in reviews as providing an assessment of the quality of the recipe included spouses, children, roommates, friends and even pets, as seen in Example 2.24. 2.24 We loved this dish, my husband and me and the cat. [Epicurious] Including the assessments of others is a way for reviewers to establish their credibility. In mentioning others’ reactions to the dish, reviewers indicate that their evaluative posts are not merely based on their own subjective judgements, but that they are also corroborated by other individuals. Beyond expressing others’ opinions (someone else loved the dish, or gave it rave reviews) there is also a strong tendency to combine verbal expressions of evaluation with behaviour-based outcomes, which signal the extent to which a recipe was successful or not (e.g., being asked to make it again, being asked for the recipe). In this way, a reviewer’s personal assessment is strengthened with further evidence from others indicating a satisfying gustatory experience. Often, in these cases, the reviewer describes the behaviours of others, such as eating quickly, finishing the dish or asking for a second helping. Evidence of others enjoying the recipe takes a variety of forms, as seen in Examples 2.25–2.27. 2.25 My friend who never eats salad had two helpings, and I’ve been asked to make it again for gatherings. [Epicurious]

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2.26 the egg-free dessert is always a major hit, with polite guests scraping the sides of the bowl! [Epicurious] 2.27 After an hour or so, my guests were shoving it in their mouths before it could crumble! But all thought it was delicious! [Epicurious] While the majority of these assessments from others tend to be positive, the same strategy was also found in a handful of less-than-positive and negative assessments as well. Behaviours mentioned to indicate a non-successful recipe include not receiving compliments on the dish, or having the food thrown in the trash, as illustrated by Examples 2.28–2.30. 2.28 I found this recipe to be very blah. It remained basically untouched at a recent party I threw. [Epicurious] 2.29 My children spat it out and cried! [Epicurious] 2.30 Even my husband scraped it into the trash after a few bites. . . . [Epicurious] In a few cases, reviewers revealed that others’ assessment of the recipes were in conflict with their own evaluation. 2.31 My daughter loved them but I think they were terrible. [Epicurious] 2.32 I thought this dip was delicious but I didn’t get as many compliments as I would have liked for the effort. [Epicurious] 2.33 My guests said the flavor was great but I was embarrassed by the runny filling spilling out all over the place. [Epicurious] In these cases, the reviewer offers up different perspectives on the relative success of a recipe. Juxtaposing the opinion of others, which stand in contrast to reviewer’s opinion (signalled here by the adversative conjunction, but), helps to

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build a greater sense of objectivity on the part of the reviewer. The general trend in the order of these types of constructions seems to be a positive assessment followed by a negative assessment (Vásquez 2011). Restaurant reviewers use this strategy as well, though to a slightly lesser extent than recipe reviewers. One-third of Yelp reviewers mention dining companions in their reviews, and in only about half of these instances (i.e., 17/100) these companions are ‘given a voice’ in the reviewer’s account of the dining experience. Most often, dining companions are mentioned as sharing the overall opinion of the reviewer, whether positive or negative. 2.34 I was there with a friend and we ordered it portioned for two people, we had plenty of food to eat between the two of us, and were definitely satisfied. [Yelp] 2.35 both my husband and I were excited to visit an institution in the restaurant world. First off, I’d like to say the service was wonderful. . . . However, we both agreed that food was substandard [Yelp] 2.36 My friend ordered the Seoul roll and neither of us liked it very much. Something about it just didn’t taste right. It may have been the kimchi, or the meat, but neither of us were fans. [Yelp] However, similar to Epicurious reviews, occasionally restaurant reviewers indicated that their opinions differed from those of their dining companions, as seen in the following examples. Once again, in most cases, positive assessments tend to precede negative evaluations. 2.37 My sister liked her sesame glass noodles. I wasn’t a huge fan of them. [Yelp] 2.38 My friends were happier with their meal than I was with mine. From my group, the pan seared sea scallops and vegetable tempura got rave reviews, the tempura wasn’t too greasy. [Yelp] In these examples, just as was the trend in the Epicurious reviews, it is interesting to observe that the reviewer’s own assessment tends to be more critical than that of their dining companions. However, in Yelp, the reviewer’s assessment is

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regarded the most important in terms of the overall assessment of the dining experience. In contrast, on Epicurious, the assessment of others seemed to be given more weight in the reviewer’s overall rating of the recipe.

Justification of star rating As I was in the process of writing this book, one of my friends happened to open a new restaurant in our neighbourhood. Within a few months of opening, my friend’s restaurant was reviewed by the local newspaper. Although the newspaper critic wrote a categorically positive review of my friend’s restaurant, at the end of the review, the critic assigned the restaurant an overall rating of only 2.5 out of 4 possible stars. Our group of friends was puzzled by this rating, and one person even pointed out that receiving a less-than-stellar rating would have made more sense to us if only the reviewer had explained why he had not given a higher rating. Many online reviewers seem to understand what this restaurant reviewer failed to do: in cases where a written text seems to be in conflict with a numeric rating, it is helpful to provide some explanation of how the reviewer arrived at the overall rating. And, in fact, a sizeable proportion of online reviewers do explain to their readers why they assigned the rating that they did. For example, nearly 25 per cent of Yelp reviewers comment metalinguistically within their review text on the star rating they gave and offer some type of rationale for assigning the number of stars that they did, as seen in Figure 2.16.

... . The only reason I gave 4 instead of 5 [[stars]] before was due to the Gummi drink price ... ... dle soups super spicy. it was a solid 3 [[stars]]. The tonkatsu curry ramen was unbelievable... ... ulgence in portion. Yum. Why only 4 [[stars]]? Pricing on some items is questionable and... ... is a very mixed review. I give it four [[stars]] because the restaurant is beautiful and has gre... ... s, I have to give Queen a Sheeba only 3 [[stars]]. Let me tell you what I did like. huge menu... ... By giving five [[stars]] here, I am wholeheartedly giving five [[stars]]. Out of all of the new ... ... f it!) So, with all this, why 4 vs 5 [[stars]]? I have to wish for a sleeker, more modern decor ... ... The only reason Taco Bus doesn’t get 5 [[stars]] is because it’s a 4  hour drive or 1-hour dri ... ... While I would rate the food as four [[star]], their service leaves much to be desired. The se ... ... t up with spice or go mild. I took a [[star]] for service – both doors are marked “use other doo... ... ething to see. If I could give 4.5 [[stars]] I would. My only complaints are pretty minor but... ... I’d rate this experience closer to 3.5 [[stars]] than 3. This was my second dinner in the Twin ...

Figure 2.16  Selected concordance lines illustrating justification of star rating on Yelp

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Fewer reviewers of films (only about 10% of Netflix reviewers) provided a rationale for their star ratings. In the following example, the reviewer playfully evokes the theme of the star rating system to frame his ambivalent (i.e., 3-star) film review. 2.39 I give it a bunch of stars for being funny, I take away a bunch of stars for being hypocritical, I give it some more stars for trying to deliver a good message, and then take away a few stars for it continuing to be hypocritical. In the end it averages out to 3 stars. [Netflix] The Netflix review platform does not allow individuals to post a review without posting an overall numeric rating, and some individuals respond to this particular constraint in creative ways – for example, by assigning a point value within the text, which is somehow different from the point value allowed by the rating system. These in-text deviations from the rating system provided by the website’s architecture are illustrated in Examples 2.40–2.41. 2.40 i totally will give it 6 stars if i could [Netflix] 2.41 I thought this movie was interesting (maybe a 3.2) [Netflix] Similar deviations (e.g., assigning half points) were seen in the last two lines in the Yelp reviews in Figure 2.16. Other Netflix reviewers used an alternative system within the text of their review: for example, a letter-based system, such as the one used to indicate grades on school report cards, such as A or C. Similar to film reviewers, nearly 10 per cent of Amazon reviewers made reference to the star rating they assigned (i.e., 17/200). Many of these references served as a justification of the number of stars assigned, as signalled by the co-occurrence with because, followed by an explanation, as in the examples below. 2.42 I gave it 4 stars because when you do have stuff in the inside pockets it puffs out towards the inside making it a little hard to see or fit other stuff in there. [Amazon]

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2.43 I give this three stars because although my hands and feet continue to slide, I guess that it helps me work a little harder to hold my poses firmer and longer AND it is a very plush mat. [Amazon] 2.44 Why didn’t I give it a full five stars? While I am fit enough to haul it around, this baby’s weight is quite substantial. I am still sort of having this love/hate relationship with it. . . . [Amazon] While this phenomenon of referencing the number of stars given by the author of the review occurs in reviews on other sites (as noted previously), when it occurs in product reviews, there seems to be a more detailed justification of why the rating was given. Among other functions, this strategy allows reviewers to focus on individual characteristics, or discrete aspects, of the product as a whole. In doing so, they show that they are able to discern, discriminate and be fair about a product, carefully weighing its strengths and weaknesses. This evaluative strategy also allows reviewers to make their logic and assessment processes more transparent for readers. Comparatively, this strategy appears far less frequently in recipe and hotel reviews. For example, on Epicurious, reference to the number of ‘forks’ assigned in ratings appears in less than 2 per cent of reviews. It is unclear why this difference exists between sites; however, it is possibly due to the fact that the ‘fork’ symbol used for rating recipes on the Epicurious site is less conventional than the star system used by most of the other sites. As further support for this speculation, I found no expressions of the reviewers’ own numeric rating in TripAdvisor reviews. TripAdvisor has reviewers using ‘bubbles’ instead of stars for indicating their overall rating: perhaps this is because using stars might generate confusion with the ‘typical’ sense of star ratings in this context (e.g., a ‘3-star’ or ‘5-star’ hotel). TripAdvisor reviewers seem to be aware of this distinction, and when they make reference to the star categories, these refer to the conventional rating system of hotels by other agencies, and not by the reviewers themselves, as can be seen in the following examples. 2.45 How can they get away with calling it 4 star though? [TripAdvisor] 2.46 This hotel is a above average 3 star hotel in Latin America. [TripAdvisor]

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2.47 Everybody at the hotel exemplified 5 star service attitudes. [TripAdvisor] Incidentally, these TripAdvisor excerpts provide additional examples of other evaluative strategies discussed earlier, such as the use of rhetorical questions (2.45) and present-tense declarative statements (2.46). The focus on discourselevel strategies in this section has helped highlight how some strategies for indicating evaluation are common across a number of review sites, while others are more site-specific.

Chapter conclusions Reviewers use a variety of evaluation strategies not only to express their judgement or opinion, but also to make a strong case as they attempt to convince their readers of their position. As is true of evaluation in  all other text-types, evaluation in reviews is expressed at different levels of language (i.e., lexis, syntax, discourse). Predictably, word classes such as evaluative adjectives are commonly used by reviewers to express their assessment of a product and experience. Stance adverbs are also a productive form of evaluation, as reviewers attempt to persuade readers about their sincerity, as they underscore either positive or negative aspects of their experiences, and as they emphasize their commitment to their stated position(s). Furthermore, I have also identified some less predictable linguistic features associated with evaluation in this genre, such as the spatio-temporal adverbs back and again, which are used to express the desire to repeat an experience. As has been discussed in previous scholarship on the subject, evaluation in discourse is complex, multi-faceted and context-specific. Therefore, in addition to taking a top-down approach and using frequency to guide the identification of recurring lexico-grammatical patterns of evaluation in online reviews, I  also used an inductive approach to assist in the identification of a number of discourse-level evaluative strategies. These have included more implicit strategies like rhetorical questions, and declarative present-tense statements, which occur across various sites. Other features associated with evaluation, such as slang, justifying the overall star rating and including the assessments of other people, tended to occur more frequently on some sites than on others. Some of these more implicit forms of evaluation are heavily context-dependent and may be expressed via unpredictable lexico-grammatical combinations. Moreover, this examination into some of the forms associated with evaluation

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in this genre has highlighted the ways in which online reviews are dependent on material practices of consumption, and it has also tapped into some larger themes associated with consumption in late modernity. For example, one productive form of evaluation is the indication of a desire to repeat a positive experience. In other words, expressions of satisfaction in online reviews are not only tied to past or present experience, but are also linked to the future. This is an interesting finding, especially considering that gaining repeat customers is a goal of many service-oriented businesses (Inman and Zeelenberg 2002). Yet another theme identified in this chapter is an ‘ethos of the underwhelmed’ – expressed by features such as the slang expression meh, as well as downgraded instances of good – which are perhaps responses to expectations created by the exaggerated claims of marketing and advertisements. On a related note, consumer expectations are often invoked metalinguistically by reviewers, as we saw in one reviewer’s mention of the quest for the idealized ‘perfect product’. Expectations of perfection, expressed in reviews, are clearly related to the discourses of the underwhelmed; when viewed together, they can be considered emblematic of a late consumerist society. Most likely, as we continue to search for perfection – on our quest to have a ‘mind-blowing’ dining experience, or with hopes of finding the ‘perfect’ diaper bag – we will continue to consume.

3

The Discursive Construction of Reviewer Identities

As vegetarians and aspiring vegans who are not exactly the culinary-wizard types, my roommate and I . . . (from an Amazon review) What could a weightlifter, a mother of an infant with food allergies, a teenager preparing to leave home, a hardcore meat-lover and a pair of vegetarian roommates all have in common? In this chapter on reviewer identities, I explore the answer to this question along with other related issues. I attend to the identities that are explicitly inscribed in review texts, as well as to those identities that are invoked more indirectly by reviewers, as they provide readers with cues about the kinds of people that they are. These days, social scientists recognize that we all have many social identities. Within the fields of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, there is widespread recognition that language is central to creating, performing and negotiating our identities (e.g., Benwell and Stokoe 2006; Bucholz and Hall 2005). The predominant view is that more than being biologically given, our identities are  socially constructed and we bring these identities into being both by the language that we use (i.e., our discourse) and by other semiotic systems (e.g., clothing, hairstyles, etc.). Which of our identities are salient at any given moment depends on the situations that we find ourselves in. Furthermore, these identities are not fixed, but rather they are fluid, changing not only over broad spans of time, but also from one particular discourse context to the next. This notion of identity as socially constructed, or performed, has its origins both in philosophy (Butler 1990, 2004) and in sociology (Goffman 1959). Although this way of understanding identity applies to all people across all settings, it seems especially applicable when we consider identity in online environments. What I mean by this is that even in spite of the increasing multimodal applications available today (e.g., for posting images and video), a

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great deal of the ‘identity work’ that we do online remains text-based in nature. Internet researcher Ruth Page explains that discourse serves as the key resource in the construction of identities online, and as a result, a discursive view of identity ‘is ideally positioned to interpret the identity work that occurs in online contexts. Online interaction primarily takes place by means of discourse: text that is created by its participants’ (2012, p. 17). Because of the potential for anonymity online, individuals can portray themselves in potentially more varied ways than they can in their offline realities, where their presentation of self is generally more constrained by their physical appearance and other material circumstances. As a result, since the beginnings of mass access to internet technologies, scholars have been fascinated by the nature of our online identities and our offline identities, and have considered the ways in which they are both similar and different (e.g., Thurlow et  al. 2004). Although early research on identity in cyberspace was characterized by enthusiasm about how easy it was for users to shed their offline identities in their online interactions, we now know that our offline identities carry over into our online behaviour much more frequently than was initially believed (Hargittai 2007). Reconceptualizing the online/offline dimensions of identity as a continuum rather than a polarity, Page (2012) offers a useful distinction between ‘transportable identities’, which are ‘attributes or characteristics that a participant carries across multiple discourse situations’ (for instance, both online and offline), as opposed to ‘situated identities’, which are more ‘locally occasioned roles adopted in relation to particular speech situations’, and which are therefore more contextually bound and restricted (p. 18). She explains further that these identities can either be ‘inscribed’ or explicitly claimed in the text, or they can be ‘invoked’ – that is, indexed more implicitly, through linguistic and stylistic choices. As will be illustrated in the examples below, both transportable and situated identities appear in online review texts: these identities are sometimes inscribed and, at other times, invoked. Online reviews represent a quintessentially ‘late modern’ form of interaction (Benwell and Stokoe 2006) in that they centre around practices of consumption and take place in a technologically mediated form between an author and a potentially vast audience, both of whom are, and will most likely remain, unknown to each other in the offline world. Yet, reciprocal anonymity does not render reviewers’ identities irrelevant. On the contrary, reviewers’ identities are very much of interest and of use to readers of online reviews (Sen and Lerman 2007; Vermeulen and Seegers 2009). In deciding which online opinions to

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consider, users of online reviews are sensitive to cues about reviewers’ identities. As they read reviews, users consider factors such as the following: ‘How similar are this person’s needs, values and circumstances to my own?’ (Forman et  al. 2008; Kuehn 2011). They also respond to a reviewer’s expertise related to a particular product (Mackiewicz 2010a, 2010b; Otterbacher 2011), as well as their possible motivations for posting a review – for instance, can they be considered a trustworthy source (Vermeulen and Seegers 2009; Willemsen et al. 2012)? This means that a more thorough understanding of the types of identities that reviewers construct, as well as the particular linguistic resources that they recruit for this purpose, certainly merits closer investigation. It is important to bear in mind that while some of the identity information that reviewers include is deliberate and strategic, other types of information may be ‘given off ’ in a less conscious fashion. For example, discourse analyst James Gee (2000) has noted that discursively constructed identities ‘can be placed on a continuum in terms of how active or passive one is in “recruiting” them, that is, in terms of how much such identities can be viewed as merely ascribed to a person versus an active achievement or accomplishment of that person’ (p. 104). For example, a reviewer may deliberately choose to disclose particular information about himself or herself, and this same reviewer’s linguistic and stylistic choices may also ‘give off ’, with varying levels of selfawareness or intentionality, other cues about him/herself as well. In other words, the ways in which individuals present themselves in cyberspace are not always consciously determined (Suler 2002). Furthermore, it is also important to remember that identity is always a bi-directional accomplishment. That is, an identity is constructed by an individual, yet it must also be recognized as such by an audience (Gee 2000). Consequently, different readers are likely to process, recognize, respond to and interpret the same set of reviewer identity information in different ways. The analysis in this chapter is informed by insights from discursive approaches to identity (Benwell and Stokoe 2006; Bucholz and Hall 2005; De Fina et  al. 2006; Gee 1999, 2000; Page 2012), as well as positioning theory from social psychology (Davies and Harré 1990). Furthermore, whenever possible, I have tried to make connections between my own prior discoveries about language and identity in these types of texts, as well as with related interdisciplinary research about online reviews. Because my primary focus is on the discourse of the actual review texts, the following section begins with the self-claimed identities of reviewers, or with the ways in which authors position

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themselves in their reviews. I begin by considering the various membership categories used by reviewers to inscribe their identities into their texts. In addition to reviewers presenting themselves in their texts, reviewer identities are also inscribed in various ways by different websites. Therefore, the chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the ways in which review websites can also position reviewers.

Personal information within the review text Whether they are conscious of it or not, or whether they do so deliberately or not, reviewers reveal varying amounts of personal information about themselves within the review text. This information can take many different forms. In order to determine what identity labels, or categories, reviewers used to identify or position themselves within their review texts, I read through the dataset and developed a taxonomy of categories which emerged inductively over iterative readings. From these readings, I identified three broad groups of categories: (1) those that correspond to traditional demographic groups, (2) newer identities associated more with ‘lifestyle’ and (3) situated identities which have to do with ‘who one is as a reviewer’. I broke each of these down further into subcategories and (with the assistance of an online coding software, dedoose) I manually coded each review text according to the subcategories discussed below. The analysis in this chapter begins with identity categories that can be most immediately ‘read off ’ of the given texts and eventually progresses to an in-depth analysis of more implicitly invoked reviewer identities.

Traditional membership categories Traditional membership categories include demographics such as age, gender, relationship status, race, religion, regional/national background and occupational/ education status. Individuals use language to create, claim and indicate their membership in such categories, and we rely on such categories in our dealings with others (Johnstone 2008). When references to these categories appear in online reviews, most of these can be considered inscribed identities, since they are stated explicitly in the text. (To a lesser extent, there are also examples of invoked identities which are signalled through some stylistic choice – most often, in this genre, through choice of lexis). As can be seen in Figure 3.1, in terms of these traditional demographic membership categories, relationship/family status

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Figure 3.1  Traditional demographic categories referenced in online review texts

was by far the most frequently occurring category in the overall dataset, as well as on most of the individual websites. This is an interesting finding because it indicates that even in these types of online interactions, which are often anonymous, we still tend to identify ourselves in terms of our offline relationships: for example, as someone’s mother, husband, grandparent, fiancé, etc. This makes sense, given that many of our consumer experiences, such as cooking, dining out, travelling or making purchasing decisions, are often shared with our intimates who are mentioned in reviews, as can be seen in the following examples: 3.1 All in all my finance and I really enjoyed this place. [TripAdvisor] 3.2 So this is my third diaper bag, for my third child. [Amazon] 3.3 Me and my wife found ourselves trying to stay awake till the end. [Netflix] 3.4 My boyfriend asked for menus and a coke. [Yelp]

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3.5 The wife had been saying she wanted duck and figured I’d give it a try. [Epicurious] Mentioning one’s relationship status in a review can serve several functions. For example, the mention of an intimate can serve as an additional source of evidence to support (or contradict) a reviewer’s overall evaluation of a product or experience, as was discussed in Chapter 2. Examples of this function include 3.1 and 3.3, where a reviewer’s assessment is supported by the shared sentiments of a partner or significant other. When reference to one’s relationship status has this function, the reference often occurs at, or near, the review’s conclusion. In other cases though, alluding to one’s relationship with others, or including a reference to another family member or partner, can provide readers with additional background context in a personal story of a past experience. In other words, it ‘sets the stage’ by adding to the narrative’s orientation, as is explained further in Chapter 5. As a type of background information, these references typically appear somewhere in the first sentence or two of a review. The next most common type of identifying demographic information referenced in the set of reviews was a reviewer’s gender. Although references to gender were only about half as frequent as references to one’s relationship/ family status, the two categories did often co-occur. For instance, while Examples 3.1 and 3.2 are gender-neutral, in Examples 3.3–3.5, it can be argued that the review’s gender is implied through conventional associations of wife/ husband and boyfriend/girlfriend semantic pairings.1 In other reviews, however, a reviewer’s gender is spelt out more explicitly, as can be seen in the following examples. 3.6 I am a single guy, so 3 lbs of bird is a bit much for dinner. [Epicurious] 3.7 5 girls getting ready for a night out and only 2 mirrors [TripAdvisor] 3.8 A woman working in a man’s world, this was a total vacation for me – and I loved it! [Netflix]

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3.9 Even as a gay man, I was ambivalent about the gay marriage issue. [Netflix] These examples indicate that references to gender not only combine with relationship status (3.6), but can also co-occur with references to other demographic categories such as occupation (3.8) and sexual orientation (3.9). By using these types of labels to self-identify, reviewers position themselves in specific ways which are presumably relevant with respect to the products and experiences they are evaluating. The next two demographic categories to occur on all of the review sites were national/regional background and occupation/education. References to a reviewer’s national/regional background (e.g., 3.10–3.16) were just slightly more frequent than occupation/education references. 3.10 Wow! From Utah, the reddest of red states, thank you, thank you, thank you [Netflix] 3.11 This hotel is just an ordinary hotel that I could have been staying in here at home in San Diego [TripAdvisor] 3.12 Here in Georgia, we are always looking for new peach recipes. [Epicurious] 3.13 Being a home-grown Texas I love hot foods. [Epicurious] 3.14 MY GRAND-MOTHER WAS FROM TORINO ITALY. [Epicurious] Especially on food-related matters (i.e., in reviews of recipes or restaurants, on Epicurious and Yelp) references to national/regional background often function as markers of authority or expertise on a particular topic, as can be seen in Examples 3.12–3.14. Although references to regional or national background occurred on all sites, they were most common on Yelp. And as can be seen in Figure 3.1, references to one’s regional background (or geographic location) were actually the most common of all demographic categories found in Yelp reviews. Because the purpose of Yelp is to provide information about ‘local’ businesses

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(Kuehn 2011), Yelp reviewers often consider it relevant to indicate that they are – or are not – from a particular place (Examples 3.15–3.16). 3.15 As a Californian, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of food at [restaurant name]. [Yelp] 3.16 I am a bit spoiled because of the amazing Ethiopian restaurant I am used to in Raleigh, but I would not go back to this restaurant. [Yelp] Similarly, in a number of other reviews, references to an occupational category also function as markers of expertise or authority, a topic that is discussed in more detail below, under ‘Expert Reviewers’. In these cases, references to a reviewer’s occupation appear when a particular profession is relevant to a particular product or service: for example, a yoga teacher reviewing a yoga mat, a chef reviewing a recipe or a travel professional reviewing a hotel, as can be seen in 3.17–3.19. 3.17 Teaching brings a lot of students with a wide variety of yoga mats. Over the years I’ve tried them all. [Amazon] 3.18 i’m a chef at a major hotel in seattle and i serve a version of this to acclaim reviews [Epicurious] 3.19 I advise the travel industry, write for travel magazines, and do scenario planning for airlines and frankly this sort of treatment is totally unacceptable. [TripAdvisor] However, a number of allusions to occupation were simply passing references to work circumstances. And again, as with relationship/family status, the mention of work or co-workers provides readers with more background information about the circumstances of the experience or product being reviewed, as can be seen in 3.20–3.22. 3.20 I took some co-workers here for lunch and was a bit disappointed [Yelp]

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3.21 I stayed here 4 times because the company gives me this hotel as accommodation (it would never be my own choice) [TripAdvisor] 3.22 I made this for my husband’s co-workers and they loved it! [Epicurious] References to age were considerably less frequent than the above-discussed categories; however, it is worth pointing out that these often co-occurred with gender and/or relationship status references, as can be seen in Examples 3.23–3.26. 3.23 My husband and I are senior citizens, about 70 years old. They did not think we would check our credit card charges. [TripAdvisor] 3.24 I’m fairly new to cooking as a 24 year old guy, but I found this was amazingly simple. [Epicurious] 3.25 I am a 38 year old female and I completely ignored the mom calls during this movie. [Netflix] 3.26 I am 17, and had been planning on saving for a [product name] for when I moved out. . . . [Amazon] The above examples reveal a trend of age references appearing before coordinate or subordinate clauses, therefore indicating their function of providing readers with additional background information and context for interpreting these reviewers’ evaluations. References to one’s religious affiliation, sexual orientation and race were even more unusual, but they did appear in a few exceptional cases. References to religion appeared only on one of the five websites (Epicurious). These references also appeared in reviews of only one recipe, which had been recommended by the webpage editor among suggestions for modern Passover meals. In these cases, references made to either serving the dish at a seder, or Passover traditions, or a discussion about which foods were kosher (as in Example 3.27), were coded as an implied reference to one’s religious affiliation.

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3.27 . . . this chef obviously knows nothing about real passover tradition. Half of the ingredient he recommends or not kosher for passover. [Epicurious] Using Page’s (2012) framework of identities presented earlier in the chapter, the reference to religion in 3.27 might be considered more of an invoked identity. In contrast to some of the other examples, this reviewer does not state his religious affiliation explicitly, but instead he invokes it implicitly through his commentary on what is, and is not, kosher for a Jewish holiday. Once again, references to religion appeared to be highly exceptional. Nevertheless, the fact that a few were identified indicates there are some products and services for which establishing this type of personal information is topically relevant. It is reasonable to assume that self-identifying as a member of a particular faith might also be expected to appear, for example, in a review of a film that has religious themes. (This is somewhat analogous to Example 3.9, in which a reviewer identified his sexual orientation – one of only two instances of this category in the dataset – in a review of a documentary about same-sex marriage.) The only reference to race (in the dataset of 1,000 reviews) appeared in a review of a stand-up comedy video, in which the reviewer self-identified as white, as seen below. 3.28 Maybe its his goal, but saying the n-word every other word is a bit of a turnoff for me. Yes Im white. [Netflix] In this particular instance, race is established as a relevant category in the review of an African American stand-up comedian because the reviewer considers the comedian’s repeated use of a racial epithet to be objectionable. It is also possible that some reviewers draw attention to certain demographic categories when they go against what is expected, such as in Example 3.28. Similarly, in Example 3.24 (i.e., I’m fairly new to cooking as a 24-year-old guy, but I found this was amazingly simple.), the reviewer makes reference to both his age and gender. This information is included as a postmodifier to the main clause (i.e., I am fairly new to cooking), and, presumably, being young and male is highlighted here precisely because it is not the assumed demographic of people who typically cook and/or post recipe reviews. In both Examples 3.24 and 3.28, the personal information co-occurs with an explicit statement of evaluation and therefore functions as a type of additional qualifier for readers to be able to further contextualize and interpret this evaluation.

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As can be seen in all of these examples, most of these membership categories, whether they are explicitly inscribed or more implicitly invoked, are somehow relevant to the object being reviewed. What is considered a particularly relevant membership category is contextually constrained by the product or service being described. For example, it is not surprising to find many self-descriptions of mother or parent used by authors of diaper bag reviews. Similarly, while the occupation yoga teacher appears several times in reviews of yoga mats, it is not surprising that other, non-relevant occupational categories (e.g., race car driver, engineer) do not appear in reviews for the same product. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is worth considering the possible range of relevant identities for any given product as we transition to the next category: identities related to lifestyles and consumer tastes.

Lifestyle and taste categories To return to the question that opened this chapter: What do a weightlifter, a mother of an infant with food allergies, a teenager preparing to leave home, a hardcore meat-lover and a pair of vegan roommates all have in common? It turns out that these are identity claims made by authors of online reviews who are owners of high-speed blenders. In this same set of reviews, other individuals chose to self-identify as a potentially dangerous impulse buyer, a smoothie guy and a recovering sugar junkie. In late modernity, it has been claimed that ‘who we are’ is defined as much by our lifestyles, our patterns of consumption and our tastes (Benwell and Stokoe 2006) as it is by the more traditional demographic categories discussed in the preceding section. This is very much the case with the identities that are claimed in online reviews. As seen in Figure 3.2 below, the total number of references made to lifestyle/hobbies and taste preferences are comparable to those made to the more traditional categories of relationship/ family status and gender (i.e., Figure 3.1). It is also worth noting that these references to individuals’ lifestyle and consumer preferences were far more common than, for example, references to their professional occupations, regional or religious affiliations, or age. Just as we tend to identify ourselves online in terms of our offline relationships, we also position ourselves according to our offline practices and preferences. The examples below provide personal information about how reviewers choose to live, as well as the types of activities to which they dedicate their time, energy and resources. These types of references also contribute to the overall construction of reviewer identities.

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Figure 3.2  Newer ‘Lifestyle’ categories referenced in online review texts

3.29 I was having 25 people over for lunch. [Epicurious] 3.30 I am an exclusively pumping mother. [Amazon] 3.31 I am a weight lifter so I wanted a better alternative than taking vitamin and mineral supplements in pill form. [Amazon] 3.32 After a few rounds on the golf course I went retreated to my room where it was quiet and relaxing. Before hitting the course every morning. . . . [TripAdvisor] 3.33 This bag is falling apart. I’ve had it for less than 4 months, and I am not hard on my things. I usually resell my “old” bags and baby items on craigslist, but this won’t even be decent enough to donate to Goodwill! [Amazon]

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3.34 I was so irritated by it that I posted on my Facebook just how stupid it was while I was watching it and it created a huge conversation with all my FB friends. [Netflix] With the exception of Example 3.30, where the lifestyle information (exclusively pumping) pre-modifies, and co-occurs with, the more traditional category of mother, it is worth noting that in Examples 3.29–3.34, it is only lifestyle information that appears as the reviewers tell – or show – us ‘who they are’. These reviewers provide information, in varying degrees of explicitness, that contributes to the discursive construction of selves who are a health-conscious weightlifter (3.31), a consistent golfer (3.32), a consumer who practises recycling (3.33) and a multitasking user of technology and social media (3.34). About half as frequent, though also commonly found on all of the sites, were references to taste preferences – in other words, indications about reviewers’ likes or dislikes. These were typically expressed using a limited set of verbs (e.g., like, love, prefer, adore, enjoy) as well as a range of idiomatic expressions (e.g., be  a fan of, be  a lover of, be  fond of, be  my thing, really go for). 3.35 I love me some Ethiopian food! [Yelp] 3.36 Not usually much of a rice fan, I will definitely make this again. [Epicurious] 3.37 I am a big fan of what I’ll call psychological sci-fi (e.g., The Matrix), but I thought this movie was one of the most annoying movies I’ve ever seen. [Netflix] 3.38 There were many occasions I preferred walking than taking tourist buses because of the density of hotspots! [TripAdvisor] 3.39 I like the idea of juicing because, for me, the idea of drinking something (especially in the morning when I am *not* hungry) is more appetizing than sitting in front of a plate of fruit or vegetables. [Amazon]

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Once again, rather than relying on traditional demographic categories to identify, define or describe themselves, these individuals chose instead to emphasize their personal taste preferences in their reviews. This type of information gives readers insights into the reviewer’s subjective perspective as it relates to the product being reviewed. Far less common were references to a reviewer’s physical appearance or attributes (3.40–3.42), or their personality traits (3.43–3.44). Nevertheless, a few of these were found on all of the websites, with the exception of recipe reviews. Once again, these types of references provide contextually relevant background information for interpreting some aspect of the product or experience described in the review. 3.40 The shower was up to my chest and i’m 5’7” only. [TripAdvisor] 3.41 And I am considered average height for a man. [Amazon] 3.42 I am a big girl myself and too many of the advertisements’ jokes were painfully cruel shots and bad sight gags. [Netflix] 3.43 A prude? Im far from it. [Netflix] 3.44 I’m a friendly guy, but even I found the staff overly familiar. [TripAdvisor] As Figure 3.2 shows, lifestyle and taste preference identity information – often as it relates to the product being consumed – appears to be especially important within this context of online reviews. One way of explaining this phenomenon is that including information about one’s lifestyle, tastes and preferences in a review enables other readers to evaluate businesses and services on these terms, and ‘the goal here, of course, is that readers are more likely to take the opinions of those with whom they identify or whose status they might seek to emulate’ (Kuehn 2011, p. 164). When a reviewer discloses these types of optional details about their social identities, it may help readers to decide whether the reviewer is someone with whom they can identify. It can also provide readers with information about the extent to which a specific reviewer’s experience and opinion are relevant, given their own tastes, values and circumstances. It has

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been argued that we tend to trust, and seek out the opinions of, those with whom we are homophilous – in other words, people who share our values, beliefs, tastes, etc. (Murthy 2013; Willemsen et al. 2012). In addition to contextualizing the evaluative comments in online reviews by providing information about the author’s unique perspective, these types of selfidentifications serve other functions as well. Reviewers may not even be aware of this as they are reading, but it is likely that the more personal information that a review author includes about him/herself, the more ‘real’ that reviewer will become in the mind of his/her audience. This is an incredibly important function, given the questions that inevitably arise about a review’s authenticity – especially since recent scandals and studies have unveiled that some reviews have been written solely for the purpose of profit (Scott 2009; Smith 2013; Streitfield 2011; Yoo and Gretzel 2009).

Situated identities: ‘Who am I, as a Reviewer?’ In addition to presenting information about their gender, relationship status, regional background, profession, lifestyle choices, taste preferences and so forth, reviewers also construct more situated identities for themselves within their review texts. In other words, they use language to construct an identity as a particular type of reviewer. These self-references may provide information about their expertise in a particular domain, their familiarity with different categories of products, as well as the frequency, reluctance and/or confidence with which they engage in the act of review writing itself. This category of situated identities is perhaps the most interesting to consider, since these are the identities that are produced for this particular social context, that is, the online review. As can be seen in Figure 3.3, the most common of these are expert/ non-expert identities [186/25], followed by non-complainer identities [20], and novice/frequent reviewer identities [5/2]. Each of these is explained and illustrated below.

The explicit construction of expertise When several of the most prolific Amazon reviewers were asked ‘What makes for a good review?’ one of the most important factors identified was the demonstration of expertise and familiarity with a product (Pinch and Kesler 2011, p. 48). How do reviewers accomplish this? As communication scholar Mackiewicz explains: ‘Product reviewers invent expertise when they state or demonstrate that they possess the background knowledge needed to make valid

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Figure 3.3  Situated identity categories in online review texts

assertions about the product’ (2010b, p. 413). Mackiewicz further breaks down assertions of expertise into categories such as ‘experience, familiarity, relevant role’ etc. (p. 414). In the examples below, reviewers highlight their experience and familiarity with a particular product. Claims to expertise often appear near the beginning of reviews, a trend identified by Mackiewicz (2010b) and corroborated by my own dataset. 3.45 Wow! I make duck a lot and this recipe is splendid! [Epicurious] 3.46 I love this bag! I’m on baby #2 so I feel like I learned a lot from the first one. [Amazon] 3.47 I LOVE good ramen, and have been to many of the most popular ramen shops throughout Japan. [Yelp] Similar to the above excerpts, in Example 3.48, the reviewer begins his review by highlighting his expertise related to past travel experiences. He constrains the scope of his expertise to travelling in one specific country. This is a common

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move found in many TripAdvisor reviews (Vásquez 2014), where rather than referring generically to past travel experiences, reviewers restrict their expertise by referring to prior experiences in a single country or in a very specific geographic region. By doing so, they position themselves not just as experts on travel, but rather as individuals with highly specialized knowledge of a relatively narrow domain. Example 3.48 contains multiple references to the reviewer’s expertise, all of which is based on several prior trips to one particular country, Jamaica. 3.48 Just got back from my 4th trip to Jamaica . . . my worst trip to Jamaica! According to Jamaican’s, I’m a Jamerican cuz I’ve been so much! Normally that would be a wonderful thing but not after staying at the [hotel name]. I figure Im in a good place to be able to write a review since I actually love Jamaica and know the real Jamaica. This hotel is just an ordinary hotel that I could have been staying in here at home in San Diego. Compared to other resorts I have vacationed at in Jamaica, this place had the worst food, service, rooms, and most unfriendly Jamaicans on the island! . . . I know better, I know the real Jamaica. [TripAdvisor] In addition to no fewer than five claims about his familiarity with this country (e.g., my 4th trip, I’ve been so much, Compared to the other resorts I have vacationed at in Jamaica, I actually love Jamaica and know the real Jamaica), this reviewer uses other noteworthy strategies to position himself as an extraordinarily wellqualified reviewer. One of these is an ‘other-ascription’, that is, the claim that even Jamaicans consider him to be an expert: According to Jamaican’s, I’m a Jamerican. In this way, he uses others’ purported opinions to bolster his own claims to expertise. Another textual strategy used by the reviewer is metadiscourse (e.g., I figure Im in a good place to be able to write a review since I actually love Jamaica and know the real Jamaica), which he deploys to draw readers’ attention to his unique credentials. Besides referencing their experience or familiarity with a place or product, there are additional ways by which reviewers can construct their expertise (Mackiewicz 2010a). They can assert or claim it explicitly by using a selfdefinition, such as one related to their occupation (e.g., I am a professional X . . .). This was mentioned earlier, in Examples 3.17–3.19, where a relevant professional label or occupational category was mentioned by a reviewer. In these cases, reviewers can communicate the nature of their expertise in rather

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overt terms. For example, when a reviewer on TripAdvisor begins her review by telling her audience I am an experienced traveler so please take heed, she claims a type of specialized authority on the topic of hotels, and by doing so, sets in motion assumptions and expectations in readers about her ability to provide relevant commentary on the topic. Similarly, occupational categories are mentioned by some reviewers in order to claim expertise about specific types of products. When an Amazon reviewer writes in her review of a yoga mat that she is a yoga studio owner, or when a recipe reviewer writes that he is a chef at a major hotel in seattle, readers gain additional insights about the reviewer’s relevant knowledge base, and the professional perspective that she/he is writing from. In Example 3.49, a reviewer of a recipe makes reference to her occupation as a personal chef. Presumably, a personal chef would have more professional experience with trying various recipes and, based on that, would be able to make a professionally informed judgement of the quality of a recipe. Her opinion may, therefore, carry more weight than that of the average layperson, or of someone who cooks only occasionally. 3.49 What a beauty! My friend made this at my request for a dinner party. I am a personal chef and we served this at party this weekend. It was not only lovely, but very flavorful and the guests loved it. I will keep this one for future parties. [Epicurious] It is interesting that the reviewer does not merely rely on this claim to expertise (i.e., self-ascription of her professional status) as the basis of her assessment, but she also draws on the opinions of others (i.e., the guests loved it) in the construction of her overall evaluation. This was discussed in Chapter 2 as one of the productive strategies used by reviewers to bolster their own evaluations, and here we see it being used by a professional chef. Another way in which reviewers can construct their expertise is through the use of specialized terminology. As Mackiewicz explains, ‘In conveying expertise via specialized terminology, a reviewer constructs an expert persona – one whose opinion should be taken seriously’ (2010a, p. 8). Research on institutional discourse has found that lexical choice is often associated with claims to specialized knowledge and technical expertise (Drew and Heritage 1992). The following example illustrates a reviewer of a yoga mat, who uses specialist terminology in constructing an identity of an experienced yoga practitioner.

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3.50 Yoga is what I do – 90-minute vinyasa practice 5–6 times a week. So I figured that the [product name] “Professional” yoga mat would easily meet my needs, since the name implies that it’s designed for professional yoga practitioners, of which I am not. . . . First off the mat smells funny, so you’ll need to let it air out or you might get lightheaded from the fumes while you’re doing your ujjayi pranayama. . . . Hoping that I just used the wrong side, I flipped it over because I wasn’t about to spend another $70 right away. The flipped side fared better, but not by much because there are always little bits of eco-mat on me when I get up from savasana. [Amazon] In this example, a reviewer of a yoga mat indicates overtly that she is an avid yoga practitioner (i.e., Yoga is what I do – 90-minute vinyasa practice 5–6 times a week.). At the same time, this reviewer is careful to position herself as a nonprofessional (designed for professional yoga practitioners, of which I am not. . . .). Nevertheless, she demonstrates her status as a highly knowledgeable nonprofessional by using Sanskrit terms (indicated in bold) to refer to different postures and practices (e.g., vinyasa, savasana, ujjayi pranayama). The use of these Sanskrit terms indexes the reviewer’s membership in a larger community of yoga practitioners. This example shows how a reviewer can combine both explicit and implicit strategies to establish expertise which is relevant to the type of product she is reviewing. Communication studies researchers who have investigated hundreds of reviews from some of these and other websites (e.g., Otterbacher 2011; Willemsen et al. 2011) have determined that nearly 25 per cent of all reviews include some type of claims of expertise. This is quite similar to the proportion of reviews in my dataset that were coded as expert or non-expert identity references. Communicating one’s expertise in a particular domain serves an important function in online reviews because it contributes to the construction of a reviewer’s credibility. Most of this prior research has emphasized more explicit claims of expertise; however, reviewers can rely on a range of more implicit strategies to perform the identity of an expert, as I illustrate next.

Implicit construction of expertise Besides overt statements of expertise, reviewers can also provide clues about their relative level of expertise in a more implicit manner. Example 3.51 shows a more subtle approach to constructing expertise. In it, the Epicurious reviewer

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constructs a sense of technical expertise by illustrating various ways in which she deviated from the original recipe. By listing different alternatives that she tried in the process of baking, and by narrating her process of experimentation, this reviewer shows, rather than tells, her readers something about her level of skill and creativity in the kitchen. 3.51 FABULOUS – with the following changes: Doubled the spices as suggested by many reviews. Used Grand Marnier instead of rum, brushed on the ladyfingers with a pastry brush. Used 2 Heath Bars mixed with 1/2 cup chopped candied pecans for the topping. ** I ADDED 2 packets of gelatin (first dissolve in 1/4 cup cold water, then dissolve mass in  1/4 cup boiling water), and add to pumpkin/cheese in mixer. I lined the spring form pan with parchment, and the presentation was perfect. Make it the Morning of the day before the party – it needs time for the flavors to meld. It’s lighter than traditional pumpkin pie, and I’m adding it to my Thanksgiving traditions! [Epicurious] Nowhere in this review text does the reviewer announce her credentials or her cooking experience explicitly. Instead, she paints a verbal picture of her culinary expertise for her readers by indicating how she: (1) followed the recommendations of other reviewers; (2) substituted one ingredient for another, and (3) altered a technique in the process; (4) added 2 additional ingredients; (5) added a 3rd ingredient (followed by instructions to others about specific procedures for adding this ingredient); (6) and modified the technique for baking. Furthermore, she provides readers with more specific instructions for how far in advance to make the desert prior to serving. This final ‘tip’ or recommendation is followed by a short, unqualified, authoritative statement (it  needs time for the flavors to meld). Other reviewers similarly construct expertise through the use of such present-tense declarative statements (underlined in the examples below), in which they assert their knowledge of the topic they are writing about. 3.52 The sauce on this is to die for. Duck needs to be challenged by its sauce. That’s why you never see Duck In A Light White Wine Sauce. Most sauces are a sickly sweet blueberry, blackberry, etc. Some of those sauces are great; I`ve made them all. But this sauce is unbelievable for the smokey-orange taste that comes out. [Epicurious]

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This recipe reviewer constructs an identity as an expert on sauces to serve with duck by using a combination of explicit claims which reference past experiences (i.e., I’ve made them all), as well as more implicit authoritative statements (Duck needs to be challenged . . .; That’s why you never see . . .), which indicate that he is an expert on the topic. This phenomenon is not just restricted to reviewers of recipes. Reviewers of film also demonstrate their expertise in implicit ways. Typically they do this by referencing their background knowledge of the film’s director, actors, production staff as well as other relevant films or genres. In this way, online reviewers adopt some of the strategies used by professional film critics. 3.53 ‘Shallow Hal’ is like Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up,’ but with fat jokes. Of course, it doesn’t contain the formalism or the visual panache, but it does share an essential theme and covers it with roughly the same perceptive humanism. [Netflix] 3.54 Written and directed by Luca Guadagnino, the film looks and feels like an artist meticulously painting a picture with gorgeous cinematography and heightening music to add to each scene. Composer John Adams relentlessly captures the highs and lows of Emma’s every heartbeat. [Netflix] 3.55 In application, similar to the scores of Terence Blanchard for Spike Lee films, but in style, similar to Philip Glass in films like Koyaanisqatsi. A must see for film students and those with an appreciation for Italian cinema. [Netflix] 3.56 The costumes designed by Anotenella Cannarozzi are impeccable, and to Yorick Le Saux’s cinematography is stunning. The climax choice Emma makes is unforgettable one, and its tracking shot in its last scene is some of the best camera work of the year. [Netflix] 3.57 The criticism of this film lies mostly in the over the top drama that is integral to this film. I Am Love including the sound track is firmly entrenched in Italian tragic opera tradition and therefore should be viewed as such. [Netflix]

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The above examples include varied strategies for constructing expertise in discourse about films, such as drawing a comparison to another film by another director (3.53), referring to a composer and/or soundtrack (3.54–3.55), referring to a costume designer and cinematographer (3.56), and making a comparison to another artistic genre (i.e., opera) (3.57). All of these implicit constructions of expertise can be considered invoked (rather than inscribed) identities. Instead of directly telling readers ‘I am expert on Italian cinema’ or ‘I have been cooking for over 30 years’, these reviewers show rather than tell – that is, they use discourse to more indirectly perform their status as an expert.

The construction of a non-expert identity Although much less frequent overall, an analogous phenomenon that was observed on all of the websites was the construction of a non-expert identity. In these cases, reviewers positioned themselves as unfamiliar with the product being reviewed, as can be seen in the examples below. 3.58 Was my first attempt at Duck . . . first time eating it, as a matter of fact! [Epicurious] 3.59 I’m not an expert, but I know what works for me. [Amazon] 3.60 I had never tried Vietnamese food before and was pleasantly surprised at how delicious the food was. . . . [Yelp] 3.61 Quite honestly this is our first time here and I can say if I ever returned to Vegas it would be somewhere else down the strip. . . . [TripAdvisor] Why would reviewers choose to include this type of information? Wouldn’t selfidentifying as a non-expert undermine a reviewer’s credibility? On the contrary, argues Mackiewicz (2010a), who points out that expertise and trustworthiness both contribute to the overall impression of a reviewer’s credibility. She further argues that ‘when reviewers acknowledge their lack of expertise, they signal that readers can trust them’ (Mackiewicz 2010a, p. 9). Apparently, reviewers’ selfpresentations as experts sometimes make users suspicious of those reviewers’

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motivations to share reviews, and leads to doubts about their trustworthiness (Willemsen et al. 2012, p. 27). In other words, an explicit claim to expertise may call into question a reviewer’s biases. In addition, experts may be more likely than laypeople to benefit from a product endorsement, or to have other disingenuous motives. By logical extension, someone who is a layperson is more likely to produce an authentic review. Moreover, most consumers are also non-experts and are, therefore, more likely to relate to reviewers who are non-experts like themselves. Consequently, as it turns out, the reviews written by those individuals who claim ‘non-expert’ identities are generally considered by users to be more trustworthy than those written by experts (Willemsen et al. 2012).2

Novice reviewers Reviewers can also position themselves as novice, or first-time, reviewers. Though not a frequent phenomenon, this type of positioning does occur across several different websites. 3.62 I never write reviews but this needs one [Netflix] 3.63 I just joined this site because I wanted to leave this review [Epicurious] 3.64 I hated the fact that it did not have any reviews for it so far, but bought it anyway. I love reading reviews, but have never written one myself. This will be the first. [Amazon] 3.65 I have never written a review before but having found TripAdvisor so helpful I wish I had consulted it before staying in this awful place. [TripAdvisor] In Example 3.64, as a way of prefacing her decision to write her first review, a reviewer of a diaper bag on Amazon expresses her reluctance to purchase a product with no reviews and indicates that she is a user of reviews herself. Similarly, the TripAdvisor reviewer in  3.65 indicates that this is his first time writing a review. Both of these examples suggest that many users of online reviews start out as readers and eventually become writers. Page (2012, p. 33)

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found a similar phenomenon with participants in online discussion forums, where contributors made reference to how long they had been readers of the forum before posting their first contribution themselves. On the one hand, the total number of reviews written by an individual contributes to users’ confidence in their reviews, because, it is believed that users who post frequent reviews are less likely to produce phony (or solicited) reviews (e.g., Mackiewicz 2010b; Wang 2010). On the other hand, it is likely that when a reviewer positions him/ herself as a first-time writer of online reviews this, too, can contribute to a sense of trustworthiness in the reader (similar to the claims of non-expertise). Furthermore, recalling that far more people consume rather than produce user-generated content such as online reviews (Jansen 2010; Tancer 2008),3 the principle of homophily (Murthy 2013) applies here too. In other words, we are more likely to identify with, and to develop an attitude of trust towards, someone who, like ourselves, considers himself or herself to be more of a review reader than a review writer.

Frequent reviewers Although there were only a few examples of this in the dataset, some reviewers actually make reference to their own reviewing history. In doing so, they construct themselves as experienced reviewers. This practice also suggests that some reviewers may have followers, or at least there is an assumption that they have a reading audience. 3.66 As I said in my [name of restaurant] review, I’m a Japanese guy who’s had Japanese food all over the country and in Japan. . . . [Yelp] 3.67 If you’ve read my other reviews, you’ll know that I lived in San Fran for 15 years – but what you don’t know is how lonely it was. [Yelp] It is relevant to note that both of these examples appeared on the Yelp website, where reviewers are encouraged to provide a great deal of personal information in their site profile (a topic to which I will return near the end of this chapter). In such an environment, it is not surprising that an individual’s status as a frequent, or prolific, reviewer becomes a relevant piece of information to mention in the review text. This status as a frequent reviewer, especially on sites such as Yelp, is considered a form of social capital (Kuehn 2011; Wang 2010).

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Non-complainers In an earlier study I conducted, focusing on negative reviews from TripAdvsior, I identified a category of reviewers who were ‘non-complainers’ (Vásquez 2014). These include examples such as the following, in which the reviewer announces, in several different ways, that writing a complaint represents an exceptional activity. 3.68 Please let me make it clear that I am NOT a fussy person at all. I am not the complaining type and just take things on the chin with my mouth shut. So it is a big deal for me to be writing this review. [TripAdvisor] This type of ‘non-complainer’ identity appears to be more common on TripAdvisor than on the other sites. However, in a few reviews from two other sites, reviewers made a point of positioning themselves in a similar fashion that is, as not petty, or not overly critical. 3.69 I’m not a stickler, but man, I was really thirsty. . . . [Yelp] 3.70 I generally tend to overlook some negatives that aren’t really that big of a deal. My idea of a problem isn’t “the girl at the counter didn’t smile at me.” [Yelp] 3.71 I don’t normally complain, but this unit isn’t worthy of its price. [Amazon] As the above examples illustrate, the use of various discursive means to construct oneself as a person who seldom complains, or as a consumer with reasonable expectations, signals to readers that they should not dismiss the review as the work of someone who is generally impossible to satisfy. These types of strategies appear to be quite useful in establishing a reviewer’s credibility, especially when the review is a negative one.

Identities invoked in a single text Returning to the point made at the beginning of this chapter – whether they are aware of it or not, and whether they do so deliberately or not – reviewers use

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language to enact different types of identities in the main texts of their reviews. Some of these identities are transportable, in the sense that they are identities that may be performed across numerous contexts: that is, in both online and offline realms. These include relationship categories, such as a parent or a girlfriend, as well as other traditional demographic categories such as gender, occupation or age. Other transportable identities that appear in online reviews are related to lifestyle choices, tastes and patterns of consumption, such as those of a yoga practitioner, a golfer, ‘a lover’ of a particular cinematic genre or a ‘big fan’ of a certain type of cuisine. Any one of these identities can be inscribed – that is, claimed explicitly in the text – or it can be invoked, that is, performed more implicitly, for example, indexed through linguistic or stylistic choices. Depending on the type of product being reviewed, which categories are considered relevant by reviewers will vary. For instance, for some products (e.g., consumer goods, hotel visits), occupational categories may be especially relevant. Whereas for other types of products (e.g., food-related, such as recipes or restaurants), regional identities may be relevant to include. A range of situated identities can also be claimed in this context, that is, identities related to what kind of reviewer one is: for instance, an expert who is very familiar on a given topic, or a first-time review writer. Exactly how much can we tell about someone through their review? As was seen in several of the examples discussed above, some reviewers include a great deal of identity information in a short bit of text, resulting in the co-occurrence of several categories all at once. To illustrate this further, the example below provides explicit information about the reviewer’s relationship status, gender (which may be treated as inferable, as mentioned earlier in the chapter) and regional background – as well as the motivation for travelling – all of which is packed into her opening sentence. 3.72 My boyfriend and I live in Southwest Florida and were desperate to get away from the snowbirds, springbreakers and traffic for a weekend. [TripAdvisor] To offer a comparison, the next example shows a combination of explicit and implicit cues at work in the construction of the reviewer’s identity. Because most of the above examples have consisted of brief excerpts taken from lengthier reviews, I wanted to also include at least one entire review in this chapter, to illustrate how a number of different discourse strategies work together in a single text to create a reviewer identity. Example 3.73 is a review of a blender.

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3.73 As vegetarians and aspiring vegans who are not exactly the culinary wizard types, my roommate and I have relied on a juicer for many light meals – a labor-intensive yet nearly idiot-proof practice. We decided to purchase the [product name] after seeing a live demo at Costco, during which the representative used handfuls of whole fruit/vegetable to make juice. We quickly surmised the [product name] was invariably simpler, clearly superior to our juicer! Owning one would be life-altering, probably! Now the proud owners of the [product name], we have failed miserably to create a juice that resembles something other than swamp water and are dually unable to achieve a consistency smoother than chowder. Even when following the recipes provided by [product name], we still manage to create separated, pulpy sludge. Undaunted by our setbacks, we persevere with optimism and undying affection for this piece of equipment. It *is* immeasurably easier use, clean, and store than our juicer, and we have had great success using it in capacities for which we did not specifically purchase it, e.g. making rice flour and grinding flax. In sum, it requires more skill to operate than is immediately obvious, but this quality is offset by varied utility, durability and easy maintenance. [Amazon] It is evident immediately from the beginning of the review that there is a great deal of personal information being communicated by the reviewer. In fact, while virtually no traditional demographic information is offered (though we do know that the reviewer has a roommate, which, for some readers, might also connote being single and relatively young), we do see several explicit and implicit references to lifestyle and consumer categories: the reviewer is a vegetarian, an aspiring vegan, a person who shops at a store which requires a membership (e.g., Costco), a person who occasionally juices fruits and vegetables, and who (by virtue of engaging in activities such as making rice flour and grinding flax) is presumably also a consumer of ‘health food’. In addition, the reviewer claims a situated identity as a non-expert in the kitchen, by presenting herself as not exactly the culinary wizard type. Most of this identity information is stated quite explicitly. But beyond this information that rests on the surface of the text, what other inferences might be ‘read into’ this particular text? What about those cues that are indexed, or given off less explicitly? First of all, some readers might pick up on the reviewer’s use of sophisticated vocabulary (persevere, surmised, immeasurably, undaunted etc.), which is typically

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associated more with academic, written genres. The use of these low-frequency lexical items, along with examples of relatively complex syntax (e.g., . . . we have had great success using it in capacities for which we did not specifically purchase it, e.g. making rice flour and grinding flax), results in a more academic-sounding text than is typical of most reviews (whose lexico-grammatical features usually resemble more closely those of colloquial registers, such as casual conversation). These stylistic choices, along with the use of literary devices such as metaphorical language (we have failed miserably to create a juice that resembles something other than swamp water and are dually unable to achieve a consistency smoother than chowder), index some level of education, or at the very least, a certain facility with written expression. Related to the positioning of self as a non-expert (i.e., not exactly the culinary wizard type) are several other self-deprecating allusions to the reviewer’s lack of competence in the kitchen (e.g., nearly idiot-proof practice, failed miserably, are dually unable to achieve); the latter two are related directly to the reviewer’s major complaint about the product. It is likely that these claims of incompetence are exaggerated, as can be inferred from the more matter-of-fact, and understated, summary statement found at the end of the review: it requires more skill to operate than is immediately obvious. In addition, it is possible that the reviewer is using hyperbole to poke fun at herself, as she describes her response to witnessing the product demonstration in the store, and her subsequent decision to purchase the product (i.e., We quickly surmised the [product name] was invariably simpler, clearly superior to our juicer! Owning one would be life-altering, probably!) These two exclamations imply a playfully ironic stance with respect to falling for the advertiser’s message: a nonliteral, tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of having been willingly taken in by the seller’s tactics. Furthermore, the reviewer’s suggestion that the purchase of a small household appliance would be life-altering is probably just as deliberately exaggerated as is her humorous claim of her undying affection for the same inanimate piece of equipment. In this way, without ever saying so explicitly, the reviewer constructs an identity of a reasonable person with a sense of humour who does not take herself too seriously. This interpretation of the reviewer as reasonable is further supported by her balanced review that includes mentions of both pros and cons associated with the product, and by her relatively high rating of a four out of five stars, in spite of her description of the product being difficult to operate. When examined in the broader context of other reviews of the same product, her evaluation seems all the more reasonable, given that other reviewers (who assigned even lower star ratings) complained about relatively trivial features, such as the product’s height, and the noise it produced when in use.

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Confronted with dozens, or even, hundreds of reviews for a single product, it is, of course, unlikely that users will undertake as detailed a reading and analysis of each review as I have just done here. Most users do not read every available review for the product they are researching; in fact, it is rare for them to look past the first page of ten or so reviews (Lappas and Terzi 2011; Otterbacher 2011). However, there is research evidence indicating that they do read the texts of at least some reviews and do not rely solely on aggregate ratings (e.g., Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006; Sen and Lerman 2007). My main point here has been to demonstrate that there is a great deal of reviewer identity construction that occurs within the main text of the review. And although explicitly inscribed identities (as shown in Tables 1–3) are very common to find in  all kinds of reviews of all types of products, at the same time, there are also many implicitly invoked identities ‘written into’ reviews as well. Why should this be the case? Unlike social network sites, where members typically share an offline connection as well as an online one, consumer reviews represent a form of social media where members most likely do not have offline connections with one another. Consequently, there is a greater need for reviewers to ‘present themselves’ textually, to provide information about their identities which helps establish their credibility, and to give readers reasons for trusting the information offered in a review. This includes showing, and not just telling, ‘who one is’ as a person and as a reviewer. However, the identification and interpretation of invoked identities involves many more inferential processes for readers than do their inscribed counterparts. Furthermore, recognition of invoked identities also presupposes a certain level of shared background knowledge about the topic and related domains. (For instance, I wonder if I would have been able to interpret rice flour and flax as ‘health foods’ in Example 3.64 if I was not a consumer of such health foods myself.) Obviously, compared with inscribed identities, there is a great deal of variation in individual users’ interest, and ability, in recognizing those cues that index reviewer’s identities less explicitly. Also, it is inevitable that there will be a wider array of possible interpretations assigned to the same set of cues, depending on the reader. For instance, while I may feel a certain affinity with the author of this particular review due to my perception of several shared interests and values (which is perhaps what compelled me in the first place to select it for illustration in this chapter), another reader might interpret the same features of ‘educated, academic writing’ (to which I attach a positive value) as pompous or pretentious. Thus, invoked identities, which are indexed, rather than stated explicitly, will inevitably be noticed and interpreted differently by different readers. This is the

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way in which indexicality works: it is indirect. It ‘points to’ something; it does not ‘spell out’. And what exactly it is understood as pointing to ultimately depends on the receiver of the message. In these cases, the extent to which a reviewer’s intention aligns with a reader’s interpretation depends on how much common ground there is between the two participants in the discourse.

What do readers do with reviewer identity information? As we have seen throughout this chapter, reviewers provide various types, and forms, of identity information in their written texts, offering readers partial glimpses into ‘who they are’ – or, perhaps more accurately, how they would like to be perceived. Yet what is far less clear is what readers of reviews actually do with all of this information. In recent years, researchers have wondered what processes are involved in how readers of reviews actually ‘use the cues available to them, to make judgements as to the utility and credibility of others’ contributions’ (Otterbacher 2011, p. 440). Therefore, the extent to which, and how exactly, the typical user attends to features like these has not yet been fully understood. One researcher has observed that ‘Although participants develop strategies for mitigating information overload, which include techniques for filtering out messages not likely to be of interest . . . little is known about how they select reviews to read’ (Otterbacher 2011, p. 425). What I have offered here is an account of what is possible to glean about reviewer identities from their review texts. My analysis and discussion have been based on principles of meaning-making taken from the fields of pragmatics and discourse analysis, centring on processes such as implicature, inference and indexicality, among others. Admittedly however, this approach to analysis has little to contribute with respect to answering questions about how reviewers go about selecting which reviews to read in the first place. Nor does it have much to say about what types of information readers use as they either attach significance to, or dismiss, a particular review. As a consequence, I believe that future interdisciplinary collaborations between market researchers and discourse analysts could yield promising directions for studying how consumers use textual information online, and what specific types of information they attend to as they make purchasing decisions and choices. Nevertheless, one trend that is becoming increasingly clear is that we seem to look for reviewers who are like us. In deciding which voices to ‘listen to’ among the din of online opinions, we value those of individuals whose tastes,

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lifestyles, consumer preferences and demographics are most similar to our own. In her discussion of earlier marketing research, Mackiewicz (2008) pointed out that with online reviews – especially where the reviewer and the reader do not share any offline ties or connections – readers look for cues of perceived similarity between themselves and the reviewer, especially in relation to social class and gender. More recently, a team of marketing researchers has observed that ‘for experience goods, the social presence provided by comments can be important. According to social comparison theory . . . individuals have a drive to compare themselves to other people. Shoppers frequently look to other shoppers for social cues in a retail environment, as brand choice may be seen as making a statement about the individual’s taste and values’ (Mudambi and Schuff 2010, p. 190). I first observed this phenomenon as I was studying a set of negative hotel reviews on TripAdvisor (Vásquez 2014). I noticed a pattern in several reviews in which reviewers mentioned having read negative reviews, but ultimately deciding to ignore them and to stay in the negatively reviewed hotel. What was the logic behind ‘reading, but not heeding’ negative reviews? I found the answer to this question in the comments of one hotel reviewer: 3.74 My boyfriend and I read every single review for hotels in Dublin and decided that this hotel sounded fine, and that the noise could not possibly be as bad as people said it was, after all, we are in our early 20s and want to go out at night. [TripAdvisor] Although not explicitly stated, the implicature here is that the reviewer’s own identity categories of ‘being young’ (age) and ‘going out at night’ (lifestyle) overrode the prior negative reviews of the hotel, which were presumably written by others who were perceived as not sharing these important characteristics. Once more, this can be explained by the principle of homophily which posits that we tend to value the perspectives of those who are similar to us, or with whom we share characteristics, such as beliefs, values, etc. (Murthy 2013).

Positioning by the website In this chapter, my primary focus has been with how reviewers create, construct, perform, enact and invoke various identities within the review text itself. However, it is important to point out that reviewers not only position themselves

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in these texts, but they are also, in some sense, ‘pre-positioned’ in certain ways by the website’s architecture and by the website’s terms of use, guidelines and requirements for participation. In this section, I briefly touch on this issue as well, by discussing preconfigurations of credibility (Mackiewicz 2010a), such as websites’ reviewer ranking systems and helpfulness ratings, as well as the user ID, and the user profile.

Pre-configurations of credibility In addition to a reviewer’s own textual claims to expertise, their expertise can also be based on a peer-ratings system. Systems such as these enable users of a website to provide feedback about whether they found a particular review helpful or not. A reviewer’s status is thus ‘vetted through the ratings of other users based on their past helpfulness’ (Willemsen et  al. 2012, p. 17). On the basis of these ratings then, a reviewer receives a ‘badge’, or a label that appears near their name on the website. For example, Amazon uses labels such as ‘Top Reviewer’ to set prolific, consistently rated ‘helpful’ reviewers apart from others. Mackiewicz (2010a) refers to these badges as ‘preconfigurations of credibility’. Communication research has found that readers are sensitive to rankings and helpfulness ratings such as these, particularly in their ascription of trustworthiness to a reviewer (Willemsen et  al. 2012). Websites position reviewers in other ways too. Besides badges based on helpfulness ratings, several review platforms confer other types of badges, which verify, for example, reviewers’ real names or which establish their history as a reviewer (e.g., ‘Reviewer since [date]’). For instance, Amazon uses badges such as ‘Real Name’ and ‘Verified Purchase’ to set apart reviewers about whom this information has been validated by their credit card order. As Luca points out in his study of the economic impact of Yelp restaurant reviews, ‘In order to find a review useful, a consumer must find it relevant, accurate, and credible. One way to achieve this is to certify the quality of a reviewer’ (2011, p. 20). Of all the sites discussed here, Yelp has perhaps taken the most measures to ensure reviewer quality. Reviewers who post a certain number of reviews are invited to become ‘elite’ members, indicated by an ‘elite status’ badge. Being an ‘elite’ reviewer is rewarded in various ways, such as being invited to special events and parties.4 However even beyond material rewards of having such special status, it has been found that ‘prolific Yelp reviewers care about social image’ (Luca, p. 4) and that these ranking badges

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play an important symbolic function on review sites by serving as markers of recognition of accomplishment within the community (Pinch and Kesler 2011). Economist Luca found that elite reviewers have ‘double the impact’ of other Yelp reviewers (p. 20). Besides encouraging reviewers to use their real names, and to post photos, as well as to provide personal information about themselves, Yelp also has a ‘check in’ feature. This feature uses GPS technology and a user’s mobile device to ‘check in’ from a particular location, thus serving as a way of confirming a reviewer’s actual presence at the location they are writing about. Increasingly, TripAdvisor is also following these trends by authenticating a reviewer’s identity, as reviewers can now log in from their Facebook account, thereby linking their participation across multiple forms of social media simultaneously. This is an example of a Web API (application programming interface), which allows a user to log on through one site, and to experience ‘online presence integration’ as they get automatically logged on to another site (Briggs 2010). At the time of writing, this technology appears to be one of the newest ways of authenticating or verifying one’s online identity, and reducing online anonymity. Of the five websites, Epicurious and Netflix reviews rely the least on these mechanisms for reducing anonymity and verifying reviewer identities. Neither site uses badges. This makes sense because the products reviewed on these sites represent a lesser economic investment; for example, in terms of adverse future economic impact, there is much less at stake with a negative review of a recipe when compared with a negative review of a hotel. As mentioned before, Netflix reviews are completely anonymous; however, the site does employ a helpfulness ratings system, which seems to impact the order in which reviews are displayed. In contrast, Epicurious does not use any badges or helpfulness ratings at all, and reviews appear to be displayed in order of recency.

User IDs Another dimension along which review sites vary is in the information that each site requires for a reviewer’s user ID. On one end of the spectrum  – and consistent with an overall trend established by the site of total reviewer anonymity – Netflix reviews are not attached to any user IDs at all. On the other end of the spectrum, Yelp reviewers are required to create a user ID that consists of their first name and last initial (e.g., Meg R., Justin C., Suzie W.) that appear, along with their profile, next to every review they post. The other review sites

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provide reviewers with somewhat more flexibility. As discussed above, Amazon, for example, rewards users who use their real name (either full name or first initial  last name), by giving them a ‘Real Name’ badge. However if they choose to, Amazon reviewers can instead create as whimsical a pseudonym as they desire (e.g., catinpants, gorrillagorilla, sewyoga). The user ID situation is similar on TripAdvisor, although I have noticed a growing trend towards the use of more names and fewer pseudonyms over the last 5 years. Epicurious reviewers have an option for creating a user ID (usually some version, or permutation, of their name), or they can remain anonymous and rely on the default user ID template, ‘A Cook [in (location)].’ In earlier work (Vásquez 2011), I noted that even from the user ID, which most typically consists of only a name and/or an alphanumeric combination (e.g., MadeleineB, Frank085, lizzygarcia102), readers may begin to infer categories of gender (and perhaps also, in some cases, regional or ethno-cultural background) of the author of review. Of course, the names used may not actually be the authors’ ‘real’ names; they may be pseudonyms. Nevertheless, the use of a proper name, or part of a name, already serves to construct in the reader’s mind some membership category(ies) of the reviewer. Other common types of meaningful elements found in user IDs include name and location combinations (e.g., BJDublin_Ireland, BertieLMelbourne, idahotraveler39), references to occupation or hobbies (imadiver3, travelingman3000, Library_HRguy, yoganurse), or family/relationship status (celticgrandma6, angelbabysmom, momof2_1954, happycouple603). As a result, even with this short personal identifier, readers can begin to make inferences about some aspect(s) of the identity of an otherwise anonymous online reviewer.

The profile Besides those identities that reviewers construct via their user ID, the profile section is another space on the review site where reviewers can disclose personal information. The reviewer profile encompasses site-given information discussed earlier (such as a reviewer’s level of activity and the perceived usefulness of their reviews), but in addition, reviewers can also use these profiles to ‘share information such as a self-description, interests, and photos’ (Otterbacher 2011, p. 425). The purpose of this personal information in the profile is multifunctional. Kuehn (2011) explains that ‘as a form of self-presentation, profiles work to secure connections between individuals by providing cues or “signals” of one’s identity

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and are thus central to fostering social interaction online’ (p. 115). Profiles also enable other users to gauge ‘the degree of credibility or reliability of information posted by another person to the site’ (Kuehn, p. 115). Of course, the extent to which users share personal information in their profiles varies considerably (Otterbacher 2011). Earlier research on identity in various forms of social media (e.g., Ellison et al. 2007; Gibbs et al. 2006; Gonzales and Hancock 2008; Joinson 2001; Lampe et al. 2007) focused only on the information found in the profile section. This offered analysts a very restricted understanding of identity, because the range of resources for constructing the self was restricted by the platform designers’ decisions about relevant information categories, as opposed to the user’s own notions of what was relevant about themselves (Marwick 2005). While there is definitely a great deal of personal information that can be gathered from a user’s profile, as I have shown throughout this chapter, there is often just as much, if not more, relevant personal information to be gleaned from the review text itself. Nevertheless, it makes sense to at least consider what profile options are offered by the different review sites. Two contrasting strategies are available to review sites: allowing users to post reviews anonymously or encouraging reviewers to establish a social image. Most sites enable reviewers to include varying types and amounts of personal information in a profile. Of the sites included here, Yelp and Amazon provide reviewers the most options in this respect. For example, some of the information included in an Amazon profile includes a reviewer’s location, his or her birthday, a personal webpage section and an ‘In my own Words’ section, where reviewers can briefly describe themselves. In contrast, on Yelp, all reviewers are required to provide a self-description. Yelp provides reviewers with space for even more types of information, allowing them to personalize and customize their profile to the extent that they desire. Yelp’s optional profile categories include predictable information such as ‘Location’, ‘Yelping Since’, ‘Find me in’, (more specific than location, e.g., a neighbourhood in a city) ‘My Hometown’, ‘When I’m not Yelping. . . ’. However, the Yelp profile also includes categories such as ‘My first concert’, ‘My favorite movie’, ‘My last meal on earth’ and ‘Things I love’, which reviewers can fill with either text or images. More than the other websites, Yelp explicitly asks reviewers to self-identify in terms of their tastes and consumption preferences (e.g., favourite concert, movie, meal). Kuehn (2011) argues that the site’s architecture ‘suggests particular ways of behaving, self-presenting or being online’ (p. 115) and that the site’s architecture actually structures and constrains

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the reviewer experience by emphasizing individuals’ alignment within particular taste cultures more than any other categories. Kuehn points out that It is notable that trust on Yelp is built for the presentation of one’s preferences for cultural goods over other characteristics. Credibility on Yelp is established not so much by members’ relationship to work presence within his or her [offline] community, but by the taste cultures conveyed through one’s display of favorite books, movies, websites and music. (p. 116)

In other words, the Yelp architecture suggests that we are defined by our patterns of consumption. Comparatively, the profile options provided by the TripAdvisor and Epicurious website architecture are much more limited. Epicurious provides space for members to post information about ‘my interests’ and ‘what I’m cooking now’. And besides areas for demographic information (age, gender, location), as well as an open-ended ‘About me’ section, the TripAdvisor profile also includes topically relevant categories such as ‘My travel style . . .’ ‘When I travel . . .’ ‘I usually travel for . . .’ and ‘A great vacation includes . . .’ For these items, the member can select from a set of drop-down responses. Once again, regardless of the website, there is a wide range of variation in the extent to which different reviewers choose to disclose personal information in their profile. In this dataset, only Netflix reviews were completely anonymous, meaning that the site does not link reviews to specific individuals.5 In other words, no user IDs or profiles appear with Netflix reviews. However, this was not always the case. In fact, in company blog posts from 2007, the company encouraged reviewers to post personal information such as photos and personalized user IDs. We are sending out this email today to folks who review movies. If you’ve already uploaded a photo, great. If you haven’t, this is your wake up call. We’re hoping to totally wipe out all those (random) automatic cinematic avatars we give you, and start seeing lots of personal icons out there. (Remember: You can change yours whenever you want.) [http://blog.netflix.com/search/label/Avatars] Having an avatar image helps, as does having a personalized nickname. . . . The more people check you out, the more influence you’d have. [15 August 2007, http://blog.netflix.com/search/label/Reviews]

However, at some later point, Netflix decided to change its policy and the company removed all identifying personal information from reviews. It is unclear what prompted this policy change.6 Following the shift from personalization to de-personalization of reviews, some members of the Netflix community expressed their displeasure about this

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change in policy. One prolific reviewer voiced his/her frustration by posting the following complaint about this change in policy, in the actual text of a film review. 3.75 Now that all nicknames and avatars have been removed, making these reviews completely anonymous, and making it impossible to follow your favorite reviewers and see their other reviews and their reviewer ranking, I’m done writing reviews after providing 220 of them. This sites policy is yet another slap in the face to Netfl*x users. [Netflix] Other reviewers found different ways of resisting this policy change of ‘forced anonymity’, such as the following individual who ended his/her review with a date and a nickname.7 3.76 . . . If you can keep straight with what’s going on, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that this film was quite an accomplishment. [3.5] I hope my thoughts are helpful 07.16.10 ~~~ Wingz [Netflix] Similarly, another Netflix reviewer also tags her reviews, and self-identifies by using the nickname, Film Grrrl, as she presents her point of view in the third person. 3.77 Film Grrrl must admit she harbors a strange fascination for the DPRK (North Korea) –that hidden kingdom where all is off-kilter. [Netflix] A particularly creative example of individuality and self-expression can be seen in the following review text from a reviewer who writes his/her film reviews in the form of a haiku and numbers them. 3.78 Haiku #713, BIUTIFUL: The nose of Bardem Its flatness brings him closer To the screen, and death. [Netflix] While the above example does not reveal any personal identifying information about the reviewer, it is clear that the reviewer has created a signature style which sets his/her reviews apart from others. Additionally, the use of a nickname or the creation of a signature style enables readers of reviews to ‘follow’ (or at least identify the work of) specific reviewers, as was indicated in comment 3.75. These

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examples indicate that recognition is an important motivator for many reviewers who engage in this form of prosuming. In addition, Examples 3.75–3.78 show acts of resistance to the ways in which reviewers are positioned by the website, in this case, as anonymous. These examples illustrate creative uses of language by individuals, as they work around the constraints of the website architecture. In other words, the site can decide to take away personalization devices, but in spite of that, some reviewers will nevertheless find a way to personalize their reviews, and they do this within the text of the review itself. To participate as an online reviewer requires adherence to certain norms and expectations, and different sites ‘pre-position’ reviewers in different ways. Yet, these final examples provide excellent reminders of how some reviewers are able to creatively challenge given conventions.

Chapter conclusions In this chapter, I hope to have contributed to larger interdisciplinary conversations about the nature of online identities, by considering the discursive construction of social identities in user-generated consumer review texts. I found that, in general, reviewers make many references to traditional demographic categories, such as their family/relationship status, gender, regional/national background and occupation. However, equally as common are identity claims related to lifestyle and consumer taste preferences. References to both traditional and lifestyle categories remain anchored in users’ offline lives and practices, reminding us once again that although there will always be some percentage of individuals who ‘invent’ fictitious identities which they perform in online contexts, the majority of us do not completely shed our offline identities when we interact online. On the contrary, various aspects of our offline lives and practices shape the identities that we both claim and invoke when we engage in the practice of writing online reviews. As one pair of scholars observed over a decade ago, ‘identities are negotiated, reproduced, and indexed in a variety of ways in online interactions, and these often cannot be understood without considering the offline context’ (Wilson and Peterson 2002, p. 457). In any online context, ‘“who” says “what” and “how” they say it, matters’ (Ghose and Ipeirotis 2011, p. 1498). This is true of many forms of online communication, where a great deal of information is shared and transmitted anonymously. However, ‘who is saying what and how’ is particularly consequential in online reviews, because of the associated economic repercussions. Today, anyone

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with internet access can provide their opinions about any of their consumer experiences, which means that we are now, more than ever before, relying on vast quantities of information provided by complete strangers to guide our consumer decision-making. This means that expertise has become distributed, geographically dispersed and interpersonally removed. Consequently, establishing the credibility and trustworthiness of reviewers has become a significant issue for users of this form of social media. I have engaged with this issue in this chapter by considering, for example, the various situated identities that reviewers construct. These situated identities communicate to readers, either explicitly or implicitly, information about their relative expertise or inexperience in a particular domain, or their prior experiences of writing reviews. I concluded by also considering the ways in which this type of situated reviewer identity information can also be ‘prefigured’ by the website, for example, by badges that are conferred and appear alongside a reviewer’s user profile. As I have indicated, not much has yet been understood about how users of reviews process all of this information; however, it is likely that they attend to both how reviewers present themselves and how they are presented by the website. A Yelp spokesperson has been quoted as saying ‘the more we know about you, the more we can trust you’ (Kuehn 2011, p. 100). As I have suggested, technological advances are making it easier for users to ‘know’ certain things about online reviewers, such as verifying a reviewer’s location, or authenticating a reviewer’s identity on the basis of other forms of evidence. It is also likely that the next few years will bring applications that will allow us to sort reviews according to certain features, which will facilitate the identification of reviews written by people who are most similar to us. Yet, none of these anticipated developments (i.e., establishing links between reviewers’ offline identities and their online identities via online presence integration, or the development of more advanced filtering systems) will make the discursive construction of online identities irrelevant. On the contrary, regardless of what technological advances may come, as long as most review writers and review readers continue to have no offline ties, online reviewers will continue using a variety of linguistic resources in constructing their social identities. These resources may offer readers additional context for interpreting the reviewer’s evaluation of a product or service. They may help readers decide if a reviewer is a knowledgeable, trustworthy and convincing source of information. Or they may provide cues about how similar a reviewer’s background, values and beliefs are, which can impact what a user does with the information that is presented within the review.

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Interacting with Others and with Other Texts: Involvement and Intertextuality

Ok, [restaurant name], imma give it to you straight. You’re not all that. You are really not. (from a Yelp review) Recent work on computer-mediated discourse calls for ‘broadening the scope of investigation to interactions among users’ (Neurauter-Kessels 2011, p. 210, emphasis mine). In this chapter, I construe ‘interactions’ quite broadly, to include various forms, markers and expressions of interactivity in discourse. This chapter addresses interactivity in online reviews by focusing on two related, text-based phenomena: involvement and intertextuality. Involvement has to do with the ways in which reviewers ‘interact with’ (i.e., address and recruit the attention and interest of) their audience, whereas intertextuality refers to how reviewers ‘interact with’ other texts. In this specific context, intertextuality has to do with the range of ways in which reviewers refer to and draw upon other texts: other reviewers as well as other types of media. There is some conceptual overlap between these categories, as can be seen in the excerpt that opens this chapter (and as will become evident in the following pages): the reviewer uses repeated second-person pronouns forms, such as you (a feature of involvement of discourse) to address the business, and also draws on some features associated with conversation, such as discourse markers (Ok) and respellings used to represent a phonological reduction in speech (imma) in the construction of the review text. These references to speech can be understood as a type of intertextuality. This chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section investigates forms of involvement and illustrates some typical ways in which reviewers address, interact and ‘connect’ with their readers. The second part of the chapter then discusses various forms of intertextuality that appear in online reviews and centres on questions such as ‘What prior texts, discourses, and genres do

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reviewers allude or refer to, as they construct their own reviews?’ The third section considers some ways in which involvement and intertextuality intersect in online reviews.

Involvement Although several definitions of involvement can be found in the scholarly literature spanning at least three decades (Besnier 1994; Chafe 1982; Gumperz 1982; Lakoff 1990; Tannen 1984, 1985, 1989), the term is generally associated with the various means through which a speaker or writer engages his or her audience. Involvement refers to the interactional aspects of communication and encompasses the attention that speakers or writers pay to the needs of their listeners or readers. It also includes the ways in which rapport and interpersonal dynamics are established, maintained and developed among participants in discourse. The notion of involvement has interested discourse analysts for several decades. Early treatments of involvement (e.g., Chafe 1982) tended to approach the topic from the perspective of differences between orality and literacy. Spoken discourse was characterized as featuring more strategies of involvement, as opposed to written discourse, which was conversely viewed as more ‘detached’ (e.g., Chafe 1982). Consequently, involvement strategies, including second-person address, repetition, reported speech, etc., have historically been associated more with speech than with writing. However, much of this scholarship on involvement was carried out before the pervasiveness of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in our lives. Forms of CMC are often characterized as ‘hybrid’, that is, as comprised of linguistic features associated with both writing and speaking (Georgakopoulou 2006b; Herring 1996). Yet, at the same time, different forms of CMC are also developing their own characteristic features and their own generic conventions. This means that, as far as communicating involvement in discourse is concerned, CMC draws both on existing resources and offers users new possibilities. For example, in oral discourse, the expression of involvement relies not only on language, but also entails various ‘nonlinguistic cues, such as facial expressions, gestures, and intonation’ (Besnier 1994, p. 281). Because these types of non-linguistic resources are unavailable in text-based digital contexts, the phenomenon of involvement has somewhat different realizations in asynchronous computer-mediated genres. As will become evident in some of the examples discussed in this chapter, beyond using recognizably ‘speech-like’

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features of involvement, writers of reviews often use additional resources such as emphatic punctuation (e.g., multiple exclamation marks) and orthographic emphasis (i.e., capitalization) to convey analogous forms of paralinguistic information in this online context.

Forms of involvement I use ‘involvement’ here to refer to a range of discursive resources that index some type of connection or interaction among participants – in this case, between authors of online reviews and the readers of those reviews. Involvement refers to reviewers’ ways of communicating interest in, connections with, and even concern for, their audience of readers. Involvement strategies can be understood as a type of discursive ‘relational work’ (Locher and Watts 2005). To analyse the data for this chapter, I identified and coded the most common ways that writers conveyed involvement. Table 4.1 summarizes some of the most frequent involvement strategies I found: second-person address forms, firstperson plural forms, questions, the expression of conventional speech acts and the addressing of ‘special’ audiences (businesses, the website, etc.). Without a doubt, there are many other ways in which involvement can be signalled (for example, through the use of vivid detail, humour and so forth); however, I focus on those involvement strategies that are the most clearly identifiable. Each of these categories is discussed and illustrated in more detail in this chapter.

Addressing the reader: Second-person pronouns The most obvious and common linguistic feature associated with involvement in online review texts is the use of second-person pronouns which are used extensively by review writers to ‘speak directly’ to their readers. In the dataset of 1,000 reviews, there were 1,338 instances of second-person pronominal forms, including you, your, you’re, you’ve, you’ll, yourself, y’all and the phonetic spelling u. Nearly 60 per cent of reviews included one or more instances of these pronouns. The following examples illustrate diverse forms and functions of second-person address found in review texts from the five different websites. 4.1 This blender is okay, but you really want the upgraded bundle with the “Wildside” jar. [Amazon]

124

186

111

404

513

1338

Yelp

Epicurious

Amazon

TripAdvisor

TOTAL

2nd person pronouns

Netflix

Site

226

93

44

54

24

11

Imperatives

38

5

7

5

6

15

1st person plural pronouns  lets

Table 4.1  Distribution of involvement strategies used in online reviews

141

44

36

15

31

15

Questions

41

19

3

14

3

2

Conventional speech acts

39

24

5

0

7

3

Addressing business

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4.2 As you plan your trip to London, I urge you to consider staying at a hotel that believes in customer service. [TripAdvisor] 4.3 If u prefer spicy food, add 2 slit green chillies just before u add the onions. [Epicurious] 4.4 The salad you’re given at the start of the meal is yummy as well. [Yelp] 4.5 My mind hurt after, in a good way, from the level of thought that you are engaged in. [Netflix] The most typical functions of second-person address in online reviews are those of reviewers giving advice, or offering suggestions, to fellow consumers. Examples 4.1–4.2 illustrate this function which goes beyond merely signalling a connection between the reviewer and the reader to indicating concern for the reader’s welfare or satisfaction. Another common phenomenon, illustrated by the first clause in Example 4.3, is that second person address forms are often embedded in conditional clauses: specifically, in if you constructions (e.g., If u prefer spicy food . . .). In fact, if  you is a very common collocation found throughout the dataset and on all of the review sites, occurring a total of 229 times. Its primary function is to delimit the scope of applicability of the review to a particular audience, as can be seen in the following examples. 4.6 This is a fantastic recipe if you love veggies. [Epicurious] 4.7 I highly recomend this if you have the bucks. [Amazon] 4.8 A good DVD rental, especially if you are a Tilda Swinton fan. [Netflix] 4.9 This salad is the bomb – it’s very intense . . . if you cannot handle intense flavors this salad is not for you – [Yelp]

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4.10 I liked the place. It is perfect if you are here for a conference. I would not really consider this place for a vacation. If you are here for a conference, you will appreciate the fact that everything is extremely close. [TripAdvisor] By more precisely constraining the relevance of the review to a certain type of individual, or to a restricted set of circumstances, the information presented in these constructions may help readers to decide if the review applies to them. As seen in the examples above, if you clauses often occur as part of advice or recommendations. Regardless of the specific form that it takes, direct address to the audience often occurs either around the first or second line of the review or at the end of the review. According to the principles of information structure in discourse, these are the parts of the message that will be most salient to readers. Sometimes, second-person address forms are used to place the reader at the centre of an experience, especially in those reviews that take a more narrative approach. This function is illustrated in Example 4.4, where the reviewer provides a description of a dining experience. Interestingly, she chooses to use a secondperson pronoun, rather than a first-person form (e.g., ‘The salad we were given at the start of the meal . . .’ or ‘The salad I was given at the start of the meal . . .’) to describe her own experience. The use of inclusive you in narrative examples such as these is an involvement strategy that places the reading audience ‘at the scene of an event so that he or she can “observe” first-hand what takes place’ (Macaulay 1990, p. 62). Previously, I identified several examples of this function of you in TripAdvisor reviews (Vásquez 2012). Similarly, in excerpt 4.11, the hotel reviewer inserts the reader into the centre of narrated activity through the repeated use of second-person pronouns. 4.11 If complimentary means 5 USD a day to you, then you will enjoy the wi-fi. You may lose the service in the process though, but don’t panic. AC will sure keep you awake all night, coupled with absolutely no day light in your room you’ll have no idea what time it is. Bring your own alarm, it is a must, no clocks in the room of any kind. Breakfast is a joke, watered down orange juice and toasts, no joy there either. You’re better off heading down the street to buy some fresh croissant and coffee, thanks god you’re in BA. [TripAdvisor] This brief excerpt includes eight second-person pronouns, including several (underlined) which function to metaphorically project the reader into a future

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situation that was actually experienced in the past by the narrator. Combined personal and temporal deictic shifts, such as these, cast the reader into the future and help the reader imagine a direct first-person experience through the point of view of the reviewer. Such uses of you are to be differentiated from more generic uses of you, as illustrated in Example 4.5 (i.e., My mind hurt after, in a good way, from the level of thought that you are engaged in.). Certainly, many instances of second-person pronominal forms in online reviews can be classified as these types of generic you references, in which you could be substituted with the impersonal pronoun one with little change to meaning, as in the following example: 4.12 definatly worth the watch but you have to concentrate [Netflix] In these cases, the you is more of a generic reference that does not necessarily address the reader. (Compare, for example, the generic you in 4.5 to the forms of you in 4.1–4.4, where a substitution of an impersonal pronoun seems less probable). Yet, even in its more generic expressions, the use of you still creates a reviewer – reader connection. Consider the following alternative forms that the reviewer could have used to express the same concept: One has to concentrate. or I had to concentrate. or This movie requires concentration. or Concentration is essential. Given these options, it is clear that making you the subject of the sentence – even when the reference is generic, rather than a more direct form of address – creates a greater sense of involvement with the reader. (Not surprisingly, the use of the impersonal pronoun one is extremely unusual in the dataset.)

Imperatives In addition to pronouns, reviewers also address readers of the site directly through the use of imperatives, which instruct the reading audience to take some kind of action, as can be seen in the examples below. These types of exhortations are most commonly found at the end of a review. 4.13 Buy one now and get healthy!!! [Amazon] 4.14 Just sit in front of Cesar, buy him a few drinks, and tip him well! [Yelp]

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4.15 Definitely follow the directions about the onion and cranberries – these little touches make all the difference. [Epicurious] 4.16 Skip it. [Netflix] 4.17 If anyone mentions this place as a possible destination – RUN! [TripAdvisor] The above excerpts clearly highlight the persuasive dimension of reviews and show that in many cases the reviewer intends to incite readers into taking some action. In a few of these examples, involvement is further heightened, as emphasis is expressed paralinguistically through the use of all caps (4.17) or with expressive punctuation (4.13). Besides conveying suggestions, advice and tips through imperatives, reviewers also use negative imperatives to warn reviewers about what not to do, as can be seen in the following examples: 4.18 Do not try to wash in the washing machine, even on gentle. [Amazon] 4.19 However, do not . . . I repeat . . . Do not go here for lunch on workdays. You will be worth NOTHING when you get back to the office. I promise. [Yelp] Whether they are used to express positive or negative directives, imperatives are a common feature through which reviewers can establish a direct interaction with their audience.

Including the reader: First-person plural pronouns Another way of addressing the reader is through the use of inclusive first-person plural pronouns. Sometimes, the expression of a shared perspective of experience is marked explicitly, as in Example 4.20, the first line of a review of a high-speed blender. In this example, the reviewer assumes that other people interested in purchasing this type of product are similarly motivated by the health benefits of making fresh juices and smoothies. 4.20 Like many of us out there, I have been trying to commit to eating healthier. [Amazon]

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4.21 WONDERFUL RECIPE FOR THOSE OF US MUSHROOM LOVERS. [Epicurious] 4.22 He makes good use of the weird hold that dreams have on us [Netflix] The use of inclusive first-person plural pronouns is often considered by discourse analysts as a positive politeness strategy (Brown and Levinson 1987) which is used to create a sense of solidarity or co-membership between the speaker and the listener – or, in this case, between the reviewer and the reader – by establishing some common ground. But this way of claiming co-membership can also be a risky move, especially in an online environment where reviewers and readers do not know one another, and where a reviewer cannot ever know with certainty who his/her reading audience will be. Perhaps for this reason, inclusive first-person plural pronoun forms are far less common than second-person references and are found in only about 30 reviews. Moreover, in those few cases when reviewers do use first-person plural pronouns, they often further circumscribe who exactly is included in that collective, through the use of restricting expressions such as most of us, many of us or those of us, as seen in  4.20–4.21. Interestingly, a disproportionate number of we/us references can be found in Netflix reviews: in most cases, these refer to an ‘imagined audience’ of film viewers. A reviewer can also construct a shared perspective with their readers through the use of formulaic Let’s . . . constructions. In this dataset, these more implicit references to shared perspectives consist of conventional idiomatic expressions, such as let’s see, let’s face it, let’s be, etc. 4.23 Ok, let’s be real. There are TONS of happy hours in Minneapolis [Yelp] 4.24 Lets be honest the price tag is ridiculous. [Amazon] 4.25 Let’s face it, if you know a little bit about what you are doing, it’s not tough to make food from scratch. . . . [Epicurious] 4.26 Let’s see, where to begin. Booked this hotel 6 months in advance. . . . [TripAdvisor]

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In these examples, which create a sense of an aside (as one might accomplish in a conversation by shifting intonation or volume), the author and the reader are discursively constructed as sharing a common perspective, or point of view. In addition, the use of these constructions lends a casual, conversational tone to the text, especially when combined with other conversational features such as the discourse marker, Ok (as in Example 4.23).

Conventional speech act formulae Other remarks addressed to readers consist of formulaic expressions associated with a range of recognizable, expressive speech acts (Searle 1976). These include conventional greetings and wishes, such as enjoy, good luck, congratulations and happy holidays. In addition, warnings (such as Caveat emptor, or Buyer beware) were also found in a number of negative reviews. I was surprised to also find apologies appearing in online reviews. For example, reviewers use sorry to apologize to readers for diverse phenomena such as complaining (4.27), writing a negative review (I’m sorry to give this a poor review), disagreeing with others reviewers’ opinions (Sorry to be the odd gal out) and for waiting a long time to post a review (sorry taken ages to write the review). Apologies such as the following example show how a reviewer pre-emptively anticipates a potential reaction from her audience. 4.27 Sorry to moan on about it, but we WERE paying Euros 145 a night for our double room. [TripAdvisor] By providing further background information (i.e., the cost of the room) with her apology, the reviewer brings a greater sense of validity and legitimacy to her complaint. At the same time, she also anticipates possible reader responses, such as objections to, or dismissals of, her complaint. Imagining a reader’s response is also a way of reaching out and ‘involving’ the reader in a review text.

Questions A productive device used by reviewers to engage readers and to draw them into their texts is the posing of questions. Questions contribute to the construction of text as an active, dialogic interaction, with the reviewer and the reader working together to create meaning. In online reviews, questions serve a myriad

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of functions, as can be seen in the examples below. These include requesting information (4.28–4.29); expressing polite suggestions (4.30), critiques or disagreement; recruiting support for a particular position (4.31–4.32); expressing incredulity (4.33); bringing a new topic into focus and connecting to the wider review community, to name a few. 4.28 Any suggestions for getting rid of the odor? [Amazon] 4.29 I was wondering, what is Apricot Nectar and where can it be purchased? [Epicurious] 4.30 Maybe a balsamic reduction sweetened with some honey or sugar drizzled over the top? [Epicurious] 4.31 Does anyone else find this offensive? [Netflix] 4.32 Wow, fast, easy and impressive, what more can you ask? [Epicurious] 4.33 What responsible event manager leaves her property while three events are taking place simulataneously? [TripAdvisor] The use of questions indexes a kind of dialogue between the writer and the reader. Even though online reviews are asynchronous and (strictly speaking) monologic texts, by sharing some of the processes of meaning-making with their readers through the asking of questions, reviewers position readers as active participants in the discourse. In some cases, as illustrated below, questions appear to be posed in anticipation of the reactions or responses of readers (similar to the case of the apology in 4.27). 4.34 All said and done, would we stay here again? [TripAdvisor] 4.35 So, with all this, why 4 vs 5 stars? [Yelp]

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4.36 Would you toss whole strawberries tops and all into your $40 blender? No. [Amazon] Examples 4.34–4.35 illustrate the phenomenon of ‘imagined’ questions, in which the reviewer simulates a dialogue by anticipating a follow-up inquiry that some curious reader might legitimately ask the reviewer. The simulation of dialogue works a little differently in Example 4.36 where the reviewer poses a question to the reader and then provides the answer to her own question. In  all three cases, the reviewer takes on the ‘voices’ of different participants involved in the interaction.

Discourse markers and other features of conversation Other conversational forms which appear in reviews as reader-involvement strategies include interactive discourse markers such as oh, well, you know, I mean, (4.37, 4.41) as well as question tags such as right? si? really? (4.38). In this context, discourse markers and other similar markers of interactivity help to convey some of the immediacy of face-to-face interaction. Interjections, another common speech-like form, are also found with some frequency in online reviews. Some interjections are associated with the anticipation of a reader response (e.g., Yes, Yep, Yeah, Yup), while other interjections are more strongly associated with affective responses or with evaluation of some type (Pollach 2006). As discussed in Chapter 2, these include expressions like wow, yikes, holy cow, man, boy, etc. (4.39). Metadiscourse also functions as a speechlike involvement strategy, for example, expressions associated with speaking, such as what can I say, let me tell you, listen and wait (for it) (4.37, 4.38, 4.40). A selection of these conversational features, and other forms of involvement, is summarized in Table 4.2. 4.37 oh well, where do I begin. . . . [TripAdvisor] 4.38 Let’s talk carne asada and camarones, si? [Yelp] 4.39 Boy, was I wrong! [Epicurious]

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Table 4.2  Interactive discourse features Discourse markers Associated with speech Oh

30

Well

24

I mean

12

You know

4

Come on

4

Interjections Yes, yep, yeah, yup

57

Wow

21

my gosh/goodness/thank god/for god’s sake/

13

Hell

4

Sheesh

2

Yikes

2

Holy cow

1

Metadiscourse Let me  tell you/start/make it clear

10

What can I say

5

Wait

3

Look/listen

2

CMC forms

Features of letter-writing

:-) or :)

12

OMG

5

Btw

2

Lol

2

Hehe

1

p.s.

8

Signature of the reviewer

5

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4.40 Oh, and don’t even get me started on the polycarbonate containers. . . . [Amazon] 4.41 And, please, I mean really (??), flaked coconut and marshmellows is the wrong idea for giving it that cetain “surprise” [Epicurious] As might be expected, emoticons and abbreviations associated with CMC – that is, stereotypical features of ‘internet language’ (e.g., lol, OMG) – also appeared in the data. Overall, however, reviewers used fewer of these CMC-specific strategies of involvement than might be expected – and certainly there were fewer of those than there were of involvement strategies normally associated with spoken registers. Even more unusual were reflexes of older, written genres such as letter writing, which turned up in the form of a signature, or a P.S. at the end of a review. Such forms are anachronisms in an online environment where the user ID most often serves as the primary identifier of an author.1 Similarly, in an online environment (where a written text need not be produced in a linear fashion), a P.S. is not necessary, since a reviewer can use ‘cut and paste’ functions to insert any piece of information, into any point of the text, at any stage of the writing process. Yet this is a writing convention of epistolary texts that has carried over into a new context, and here, its use signals the addition of some less central, and perhaps even trivial, piece of information. Discourse analyst Johnstone explains that it is not unusual to find the integration of elements from other previous forms of communication in CMC genres: ‘Newer text types like email messages and web pages draw on older text-types like memos and print advertisements. . . . New situations call for new combinations of old communicative strategies’ (2008, p. 163). Thus, the incorporation of some of these features associated with written genres – or with spoken genres, such as conversation – can be regarded not only as strategies of involvement, but also as a type of intertextuality (which will be discussed in a later section of this chapter).

Simulating conversation: Imagined dialogues The following examples illustrate in detail some of the ways in which the dynamics of a conversation are simulated in online reviews. In the first of these, the reviewer uses a floor-holding mechanism (Wait! There’s more . . .), which, in conversation, indicates that a speaker has not yet completed a turn at talk, or has not yet finished telling a narrative.

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4.42 Wait! There’s more: There was no iron in the room. [TripAdvisor] In this asynchronous CMC context, where there is no danger of being interrupted, such a device clearly serves a more symbolic function than it would in faceto-face interaction. Perhaps here, it is a way to hold the reader’s attention or interest, as well as for the reviewer to signal to the reader that the reader’s active engagement in the text is important and valued. In the second sentence of the next example, the reviewer uses repetition (melt), preceded by an affirmative response (Yes) and a speech act verb (I said), to simulate a dialogue, as though she were having a conversation with a reader. This is similar to the examples of imagined interactions, as seen in 4.34–4.36. 4.43 Meanwhile, the black plastic seal below the blade would fall apart – shredding and melt with use. Yes I said melt. [Amazon] In doing so, this reviewer provides her own follow-up to an imagined response of incredulity to her claim about a piece of the expensive appliance actually melting. Here, metadiscourse is used as a way of confirming to the reader that there is no error in interpretation of her account of what happened. The way in which this metadiscourse is packaged does not refer to the written, text-based form of the review (e.g., Yes, I wrote/meant/etc.) but rather, it is expressed as though it were spoken (i.e., Yes, I said melt), further alluding to the give-andtake interaction of a conversation. The next example is an excerpt that is parenthetically set off from the rest of the surrounding review text. The reviewer’s second-person addresses of the reader (Now don’t tell me . . .) imagines a response of her audience, as she anticipates possible critiques from others about the carelessness of her actions in overfilling her blender. 4.44 (Now, don’t tell me about the directions and that I was careless. I understand. My point is that you can overfill the [competitor brand] and not have an accident. and what good is a carafe you can only fill to the three quarter mark?) [Amazon] Here, she begins her aside by reacting to an imagined response of how others might perceive her and how they might characterize her behaviour. This is followed by a short sentence, I understand, which represents a response to an

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imagined interlocutor. Her parenthetical digression concludes as she poses a question to her reader(s) in order to recruit support for her position. This text also has what we might think of as ‘dialogic overtones’ (Bakhtin  1981), or, in other words, several intertextual allusions to the negotiation that takes place between the speaker and the hearer – or in this case, between the reader and the writer. In Example 4.44, this is accomplished through the reviewer’s ‘arguing against’ some imagined objections of the reader. These conversational devices, along with other ways of directly addressing an audience of readers, are ways of expressing involvement and interactivity. It is interesting that they appear with considerable frequency, in what is essentially a text-based, asynchronous and unidirectional mode of communication. According to a Bakhtinian interpretation, when such dialogic overtones appear in a text, they invoke both the writer’s presence and the writer’s awareness of the reader. Thompson and Zhou (2000) explain that ‘Writers can therefore exploit them to make what is in fact a monologue sound like a dialogue – and thus, achieve a more reader-friendly tone’ (p. 140). This shows reviewers’ awareness of the need to acknowledge their readership as well as perhaps their own understanding of reading as an interactive process. These instances of drawing on stereotypical features of conversation can also be viewed as forms of intertextuality, wherein one genre (the text-based online review) incorporates features from a different genre (conversation).

Addressing audiences other than fellow consumers (business owners) In an early study of TripAdvisor reviews (Vásquez 2011), I noticed that while most of the time reviewers addressed other travellers, some reviewers also used the review space to address the hotel management. In these instances, many of the same forms discussed above (i.e., imperatives, second-person pronouns) are used by reviewers, but the audience being addressed is a different one altogether. Rather than addressing fellow consumers, in these cases, reviewers address business owners, as can be seen in the following example: 4.45 Thanks [hotel name] for ripping us off. We thought you were a nice, upscale hotel. WE WERE FOOLED!! [TripAdvisor] The prospective audience of any online review text is indeterminate and potentially vast, making it possible for reviewers to address a number of different audiences

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simultaneously, sometimes even within the same review. Similar  instances of reviewers addressing their complaints or suggestions to businesses (as opposed to fellow consumers) appeared on other websites, for example, in this Yelp review. 4.46 Note to [restaurant name]: invest in some freakin’ umbrellas that bend and more of them. We’re paying a lot of money to enjoy your establishment so please respect your customers. [Yelp] This is similar to the excerpt at the beginning of the chapter, where the reviewer addresses the business by name and through the use of second-person pronouns. Besides complaining and providing suggestions, some reviewers used the review space to express gratitude to the owner of a business or to some of its employees, as can be seen below. 4.47 Thank you [brand name] for such a quality product. [Amazon] According to Kuehn (2011), such forms of gratitude are used in online reviews to display brand loyalty. However, the thanking frame is also, on occasion, used ironically as a preface to the complaint, as was seen in Example 4.45 and in several other instances in the dataset. A more unusual audience appearing as the addressee of reviews occurred exclusively in Netflix reviews, and consisted of comments which ostensibly addressed artists, actors or filmmakers, as illustrated in the two examples below. 4.48 I usually love Farley bro. movies. For shame guys, for shame. 4.49 Come on Katt! As these examples show, in the few instances in which this occurred, reviewers used the address form as a way of expressing their disapproval or disappointment. In Netflix reviews, these instances addressing an individual responsible for the product most likely serve a rhetorical rather than literal function. In other words, while it is clear that some hotel managers and restaurant owners do read usergenerated comments such as 4.45–4.46,2 it is perhaps less likely that artists and

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filmmakers would actually take the time to do so. Nevertheless, these forms of direct address are not only an involvement strategy but also serve as a vehicle for the expression of evaluation.

Summary of involvement In exploring different forms of involvement, we have observed that reviewers use a range of strategies to address their readers, both directly and indirectly. Involvement strategies are essential to how reviewers ‘do things’ with words – in other words, how they use language to ‘act on the world’ and to convince their audience of taking some future action. This includes how they formulate directives, suggestions, warnings as well as the performance of other speech acts like thanking and apologizing. Furthermore, in taking a closer look at specific examples, it appears that involvement often interacts with evaluation (e.g., in the case of questions, or interjections). In order to engage their readers, many reviewers draw on involvement strategies typical of conversation (such as discourse markers and speech-like metadiscourse) and carry them over into this CMC context. Creating a dialogue between the reader and the writer, the deployment of these discursive resources can also be viewed as a type of intertextual reference in which the review writer evokes, or simulates, the dynamics of conversation.

Intertextuality Intertextuality refers to the relationship between one text and other texts. Theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes have contributed to our understanding of intertextuality by explaining that any utterance, or piece of writing, always bears some traces of prior texts (Allen 2011). Another way of saying this is that all spoken or written texts exist in an intertextual relationship with other texts. Inherent in the process of constructing any text, writers draw upon not only a whole range of intertextual links, but also upon ‘their intertextual knowledge of wider conventional genres of a whole’ (Bax 2011, p. 29). Intertextuality actually refers to wide array of textual practices, ranging from repetition, quotations and allusions made to other texts, to the importing of larger discourse conventions from a single genre, or transporting those conventions from one genre to another. Thus, intertextuality can either be conceptualized narrowly – as drawing on the words of, or making reference to,

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some other text(s) – or be conceived of more broadly, as ‘genre-mixing’ or the ‘hybridization of one genre or text-type with another’ (Bloor and Bloor 2007, as cited in Bax 2011, p. 28).3 Intertextuality extends well beyond making reference to other texts. Intertextuality is also about meaning-making. Indeed, as discourse analyst Bax argues: intertextual awareness is more than just references, but plays its part in the whole complex process of constructing texts and also in the process of interpreting and understanding them, and as such constitutes a key part of our discourse comprehension. (2011, p. 163)

In other words, meaning does not reside in the text itself, rather each text is embedded in ‘interdiscursive, intertextual layers of social and historical practices’ (Benwell and Stokoe 2006, p. 104). In analysing intertextuality, literary scholar Bazerman (2004) advocates taking a contextual and functional approach, by considering not only which texts are being referred to, but also how they are used to position the author in making a unique statement. I used Bazerman’s helpful guidelines in the following analysis of intertextuality in online reviews. Certain types of intertextuality have been described as characteristic of particular CMC genres. For example, links to other websites have been identified as distinguishing blogs and wikis from other genres (Myers 2010). Similarly, message intercalation, ‘which involves editing a previous message in order to leave only that which is relevant to the response’, seems to be an intertextual practice that is characteristic of instant messaging or blog post/ comment exchanges (Benwell and Stokoe 2006, p. 260, referencing Crystal 2001); a more recent, related form of this is the Twitter ‘re-tweet’. In text messages, repetition is a common form of intertextuality, as discourse analyst Caroline Tagg (2012) explains, because of its important function of providing coherence between messages in this asynchronous mode of communication. Considering yet another form of intertextuality at the discourse level, the sharing of a narrative has been found to spark the posting of a ‘second story’ on a related topic, in both online forums (Page 2012) and email messages (Georgakopoulou 2007a, 2007b). In an early genre analytic study of online product reviews, Pollach (2006) found that intertextuality was not a feature associated with this particular genre. Pollach noted that her review texts ‘remain in isolation. They are generally not linked textually or hypertextually to other relevant information. Also, authors

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do generally not seek to encourage readers to respond to what they have written’ (p. 8). However, I have found the opposite to be true of my own dataset of online reviews. In fact, I have found richly varied forms of intertextuality. Thus, in the section that follows, I take up this topic by exploring an array of intertextual practices that authors of online consumer reviews engage in as they construct their texts.

References to/direct address to other reviewers The most common form of intertextuality happens when authors of reviews refer to texts written by other reviewers. In Chapter 3, I briefly touched upon the phenomenon of ‘reading, but not heeding’ the reviews of others. This initial observation made me curious about how many reviews included intertextual references to other reviews or reviewers, and what functions those served. I  found that just over ten per cent of reviews (N132) included reference to other reviews, and these were constructed using a variety of forms, including the obvious review(s)/reviewer(s), as well as others, many of you, some of you, the comments, people, etc. Quite often, these intertextual allusions to the comments of prior reviewers take the form of agreement, or alignment with, others’ opinions. Referring to conventional interpretations of agreement as a sign of positive politeness (e.g., Brown and Levinson 1987), Mackiewicz (2010a, 2010b) has noted that agreement with other reviewers can be interpreted as a sign of solidarity. Agreement with other reviewers is a phenomenon that appears on reviews from all five sites. 4.50 Stayed in the [hotel name] and agree with the other reviews in how dirty and dingy this place is. [TripAdvisor] 4.51 I do however, agree with the previous commenters about the service being less than stellar. [Yelp] 4.52 I agree with the reviews – 1/4 cup of rum is very strong [Epicurious] 4.53 I agree with 3 of the reviewers on the first page. . . . [Netflix]

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4.54 Unfortunately, I have to agree with another review. This tea tastes like an extract of pipe tobacco. [Amazon] This consensus construction lends itself to a spirit of collaboration and therefore of community building. Furthermore, by referring to having read the reviews of others, these authors of reviews simultaneously position themselves as readers of reviews. Of course, instances of disagreement are also found on all of the sites, as reviewers occasionally disagree with the viewpoints and opinions of other reviewers. 4.55 Unlike some other Yelp reviewers, the fish in our selections was very fresh [Yelp] 4.56 Unlike other reviews, I had a very good experience [TripAdvisor] 4.57 This recipe was great! Very easy to prepare, and I did not find the batter runny at all, contrary to other reviews. Will definitely keep this and make it again! [Epicurious] 4.58 I have to disagree with the recent negative reviews [Netflix] Comparatively, the verb agree occurred 20 times in the dataset, whereas the verb disagree only occurred 3 times. Overall then, it is clear that more reviewers go ‘on record’ as agreeing (e.g., I agree with . . .) than as disagreeing. Furthermore, the preferred linguistic structure for disagreeing typically takes a less direct form (e.g., Unlike others, contrary to). While this difference in levels of directness between agreeing and disagreeing may reflect general politeness conventions in English (where disagreement is typically considered a ‘dispreferred’ response to an evaluation, Pomerantz 1984), less direct disagreement constructions are also especially useful in the specific context of online reviews. By using a construction such as contrary to others or unlike other reviewers, the reviewer implicitly acknowledges the uniqueness of consumer experiences and the inherent subjectivity involved in his/her own evaluation.

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It is a means of expressing concession and one which grants validity to the assessment of others while nevertheless maintaining a difference of personal opinion. Even in the final instance in the disagreement examples (4.58), where the reviewer actually does use the word disagree, there is a subtle difference between this form and the majority of those expressing simple agreement. Whereas the general tendency for expressing agreement is I agree, the reviewer in Example 4.58 inserts the semi-modal have to before the main verb (I have to disagree.) The semi-modal have to (whose meaning is similar to other modals and semi-modals of obligation and necessity, such as must, ought to, need to) connotes a sense of being compelled to take an action, perhaps one which is unavoidable. The semi-modal also appears in one of the agreement examples, 4.54: Unfortunately, I have to agree with another review. This tea tastes like an extract of pipe tobacco. However, it is important to note that in this case, the reviewer is agreeing with a negative review rather than with a positive review. Moreover, because the negative review with which he is agreeing appears in grammatically singular form (i.e., another review), most likely, it does not represent the majority or consensus opinion about this product. Therefore, a general sense of reluctance about expressing this negative assessment is accomplished here with the semi-modal have to as well as with the adverb unfortunately which precedes it. As the examples below show, many reviewers express their disagreement with others even more implicitly. 4.59 I was very surprised considering the rave reviews it got here. [Epicurious] 4.60 some of the reviewers here are overly critical-missing the point [Netflix] 4.61 This movie is sick. Haters are hatin for no reasons. [Netflix] In Examples 4.59–4.61, the reviewers signal their disagreement by making evaluative claims about others’ reviews. The reviewer in  4.59 contrasts her experience with the prior positive assessments of others, whereas the positive assessment of the reviewer in 4.60 contrasts with earlier, more ‘critical’, reviews. Example 4.61 also expresses disagreement indirectly, however, this time, using more colloquial forms. Sick, in this case, is an expression of positive assessment, which contrasts with the sentiments in the following sentence – that is, that the

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critiques of the negative reviewers are invalid (Haters are hatin for no reasons). To sum up, when reference is made to other reviewers/reviews to express agreement, the agreement tends to be formulated in more direct, or explicit, terms. And disagreement, when it occurs, tends to be stated in more indirect, or implicit, terms. Situating one’s own opinion in the context of others’ opinions is a common strategy in online reviews, perhaps because reviewers are aware that ‘how opinions are received depends on the relation of the content of a review to what other authors have written’ (Otterbacher 2011, p. 428). Furthermore, as one group of communication researchers has noted, comments expressing agreement or disagreement (which interact with overall review valence and helpfulness ratings) do influence readers of reviews with respect to their attitude towards a product (Walther et al. 2012).

Reference to a specific reviewer(s) Sometimes, individuals refer to specific reviewers in their review text. The examples below show that this can be done by using a specific reviewer’s name (4.62). Or, when the reviewer remains otherwise anonymous, this can be accomplished by referring to other forms of identifying information – for example, the reviewer’s location, which is often used as a default identifier on Epicurious (4.63) – or by referencing some specific point made in a prior review (4.64). Most often, this is a way of aligning one’s perspective with that of another reviewer, often by signalling agreement (as was discussed above) with a specific individual. 4.62 Matt S. was right: walk away. . . . [Yelp] 4.63 I think it is essential to follow the advice of the person from Northern Virginia, that is using a mirepoix and some kind of broth either vegetable or chicken. [Epicurious] 4.64 As another review said, it’s like Subway, but Vietnamese. [Yelp] Other times when a reviewer chooses to agree or disagree with a previous reviewer’s point, she/he addresses them directly, using a second-person pronoun rather than a third-person reference, as seen in Example 4.65.

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4.65 . . . and the restaurant some of you had complained about was no longer operating. [TripAdvisor] This is a different intended audience than was addressed by the uses of you that were discussed above under ‘Involvement’, which included anyone reading the review. In contrast, the you in the example above is constrained to a more select group, not to fellow consumers, but rather, to previous reviewers (and even more specifically, to those previous reviewers who complained about the hotel’s restaurant in their reviews). Cases such as these are helpful in illustrating the overlap between intertextuality and involvement: the use of the second-person pronoun here functions simultaneously both as a marker of intertextuality (referring to others’ reviews) and as an involvement strategy (directly addressing a group of reviewers). Furthermore, by contextualizing her own review against the backdrop of others’ reviews, the author constructs her membership in this particular community of reviewers. In general, this type of direct address, or even mention of, another specific reviewer is most uncommon in Netflix reviews, perhaps because they are not linked to any user IDs, profiles or other author-identifying information. However, in the following instance, one Netflix reviewer addresses another reviewer very specifically, although in a highly unusual manner. 4.66 If you watch this movie, be sure to watch it. Don’t read, knit, or try to write a review to another movie, while you watch this movie (Gene Shalit, I’m looking at you), because this movie will require you use all of your cognitive thinking power to follow. [Netflix] Here, the reference to North American film critic, Gene Shalit, appears to be a tongue-in-cheek response to another reviewer who, in an earlier review, indicated that he/she had, while watching the film, posted an evaluation of it on Facebook. (An excerpt of the review being referenced can be seen in Example 3.34 in Chapter 3). The intertextual meaning in this text is doubly embedded. In order to derive the meaning of this reference, which indexes the larger overarching genre of film reviews more generally, readers will first need to be familiar with North American popular culture to know who Gene Shalit is. Second, my own interpretation of who exactly the reviewer is addressing as ‘Gene Shalit’ is contingent on my familiarity with the review history for this film on this website: in other words, it is based on having read prior reviews of the same film, on

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the Netflix website. Further, the expression looking at you (which, of course, is meant non-literally in this text-based asynchronous environment) is derived from face-to-face communicative contexts in which participants are co-present, and therefore, it could be argued that this too is an intertextual reference to conversational interaction. Finally, as was mentioned in Chapter 3, although it is a relatively rare phenomenon, some individuals construct situated identities as frequent reviewers by making intertextual references to prior reviews that they themselves have written and posted on the same website (e.g., Examples 3.66–3.67 from Yelp). On some sites, being a frequent or prolific reviewer is regarded as a powerful source of social capital, as Pinch and Kesler (2011) explain. It is something that can bring a personal sense of accomplishment and offers rewards not available by traditional means. We are struck by the comments of the respondent who said, “Amazon saved my life” and by the fact that Amazon reviewing for some people provides a means of accomplishing something in their lives outside of orthodox careers. (p. 70)

It is also evident that some reviewers develop a following of readers. For example, Kuehn (2011), in her interviews with Yelp reviewers, found that ‘A number of writers indicated that they were actually ‘known for’ their writing style or some other means of self-presentation on Yelp (e.g., their technical format, interests, sense of humor)’ (p. 208). Beyond developing a signature style, what better way to help sustain a dedicated following of readers than by referencing one’s own reviews? While some reviewers may inspire a cult following, it is rare that their celebrity extends beyond the community of readers of that particular website. However, even that has been known to happen: for example, when Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s Top Reviewer (to whom over 100,000 reviews have been attributed) was featured in Time magazine (Grossman 2006).

Reference to the website Another interesting form of intertextuality that appears in reviews is the referencing of the actual review website by name. As is true of any discourse feature, the intertextual referencing of the website itself can serve many functions. It can be used to explain how a reviewer selected a particular product or service. It can be used to clarify, explain, or to counter, other posts found on the site. Or it can be used as a way to affiliate with the site by demonstrating one’s support or approval.

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4.67 my husband thinks I’m a great cook, but he doesn’t know about my epicurious connection [Epicurious] 4.68 I use yelp as my guide. It is my north star for cuisine when I travel in unknown lands. I never venture below the 4-star barrier. It’s just too dangerous. [Yelp] The above excerpts show that some reviewers, in the process of evaluating a specific product, at the same time are also promoting the website itself. These examples offer excellent illustrations of how prosuming works on multiple levels, including reinforcement of the branding of the actual website that a reviewer is contributing to when he or she posts a review of some other product.

Reference to other textual sources and to other discourse systems Besides making reference to other reviews and reviewers, to themselves and to the website, a number of reviewers also made intertextual references to other types of texts that were somehow relevant to the product. These references appeared in just under 10 per cent of reviews. Most common were references to online texts such as Wikipedia entries, youtube videos and other related websites. For example, a few Yelp reviewers referred to a restaurant’s website, just as some TripAdvisor reviews made references to a hotel’s website. In addition, on TripAdvisor reviews, there were also several references to online booking services such as hotels.com or kayak.com. Besides intertextual references to online sources, an equal proportion of references was made to offline textual sources. These often cited a product’s label or manual, a sign found in a particular location or a popular media source. Very often, when references are made to other (either online or offline) textual sources, these references provide readers with some clarification or additional information about some aspect of the product. The example below illustrates how the reviewer, in describing the film’s plot, uses an intertextual reference to provide a dictionary definition for the Latin phrase, deus ex machina, clarifying its meaning for readers who might not be familiar with the expression.

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4.69 . . . and boom, the plot veers off the road by accelerating into a deus ex machina (Websters definition: a person or thing, as in fiction or drama, that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty). [Netflix] The following examples are excerpted from two different reviews of tea. Both reviewers use the same intertextual strategy of providing a direct quotation from another textual source: in 4.70, it is from an online source (a Wikipedia entry), whereas in 4.71, it is from an offline source (the product label). 4.70 I am also trying out hibiscus tea because I have read that there are clinical trials that show hibiscus lowers blood pressure. . . . From Wikipedia: “A study published in the Journal of Human Hypertension has shown that drinking hibiscus tea can reduce high blood pressure in people with type 2 diabetes . . .” [Amazon] 4.71 This Organic Green Tea Kombucha from [Brand name] is certainly unique. It  tastes like a mixture of passion fruit, plum, ginger, and green tea. . . . [Brand name] writes this on the box about the tea’s benefits: “Green Tea Kombucha is based on an ancient remedy and offers a convenient form of Kombucha designed for daily use. Legend has it that some 2,000 years ago . . .” [Amazon] These types of references show intertextual links in action. As reviewers adopt and appropriate other sources in constructing their own texts, they not only embed the words of those sources through the use of quotations, but they also simultaneously draw upon the larger discourse systems in which those quoted texts operate. For example, both of these reviewers extol the health benefits of drinking certain types of tea, yet there are also important differences between the two. Example 4.71, in which the reviewer quotes from the online source, Wikipedia, draws on the discourses of empirical investigation in western medicine, with its references to research findings published in a medical journal. In contrast, Example 4.72, with its reference to the product as an ‘ancient remedy’, draws upon discourses of traditional, or holistic, approaches to health and medicine. While these may not represent deliberate choices on the part of

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reviewers, the insertion of these particular texts into their reviews nevertheless implicates the representation and reproduction of those larger discourse systems in which the quoted texts circulate.

Intertextual relationships with other genres Expanding on the above discussion, I now turn to instances of intertextuality in which reviewers draw on larger discourse conventions associated with different genres. I focus, in particular, on examples of intertextuality which involve the blending of advertising, activist or artistic genres. These instances of intertextuality are larger than word or sentence-level allusions that I have discussed so far; rather, they refer to the authors’ use of other text types or genres in the construction of their reviews. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Netflix haiku review is a clear example of genre-mixing. The author of Example 3.78 in Chapter 3 used the structure of this poetic form to create his review. The haiku reviewer is noteworthy not only for taking a clever and ludic approach to writing the review, but also for actually transforming the relatively prosaic genre of the consumer review into a literary genre. While such examples are certainly not the norm in online reviews, haiku reviews have evolved into a much larger online phenomenon. There are blogs and websites of haiku reviews of films, music and books, and haiku reviewers can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.4 Thus, while it is clear that the majority of consumer reviews do not appear in this poetic form, it is safe to say the haiku reviewer on Netflix is participating in a much larger internet phenomenon of haiku reviewing. Beyond appropriating artistic genres such as poetry, there are other features associated with literary language that occasionally appear in online reviews: these are discussed further in Chapter 5, on narrativity. Not surprisingly, many online reviews draw on the discourses of sales, advertising and marketing. The following examples in Table 4.3, all from recipe reviews, have a familiar, advertising-slogan-like quality. In other words, they come across to us as ‘canned’ messages, rather than providing any descriptive or specific information about the recipe being reviewed. Instead, these texts sound similar to something we might have heard on a commercial, or read in a print advertisement. Often, as seen in the last few examples, these ‘advertising’-type of messages take the form of suggestions, and they tend to be found near the end of the review. Examples such as these reveal how the evaluative language that we (as private

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Table 4.3  Examples of appropriation of advertising discourse from Epicurious reviews It’s the recipe that keeps on giving. Love at first bite . . . do yourself a favor and make it tonight! Great side dish for crowd in summer Try them at your next cocktail party – people will love them You cannot go wrong – this is definitely a winner! . . . few things can top this! I highly recommend this for your spring/summer entertaining!

individuals and consumers) use is inevitably shaped by the discourses of media advertising that surround us. As endorsers of a product or service, individuals who write reviews appropriate elements of these advertising discourses and, in doing so, they ‘sell’ their readers on the benefits of products which they support and believe in. While some reviewers may adopt the conventions of those genres deliberately, many probably do so unwittingly. The appropriation of advertising discourse appears frequently in Yelp restaurant reviews. Very likely, Yelp reviewers’ drawing on the genre of popular advertising (print, commercials) is related to the site’s stress on reviewers being ‘funny’ and ‘cool’. 4.72 I’m sorry babe, but I’m leaving you for the man bringing me endless loaves of hot Cuban bread. In Example 4.72, the reviewer begins her text as a form of ‘pseudo-address’ to her significant other, playfully explaining that she plans to abandon him for her waiter. It is not surprising that some reviews sound like product endorsements or advertisements, since that is essentially what they are. Consequently, it is not rare to observe reviewers drawing upon existing forms and conventions of these closely related, pre-existing, commercial genres. The resulting texts can be thought of as hybrid discourses in which prosumers appropriate the discourse of advertising, blending cheery, jingle-like slogans such as ‘Try it, you’ll love it!’ with accounts of their own personal experiences. I conclude this section with one of the most unusual examples of genremixing. This example is a review of a high-speed blender, written by the wife of a

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man suffering from health problems caused by a diet soda addiction. Although the review begins as a personal narrative, in this example, the reviewer also takes an ‘activist’ stance, by inserting her message of ***ASPARTAME KILLS*** in two separate points in her review. I refer to this as an ‘activist discourse’ because this simple two-word message is reminiscent of what might be written on a protest sign, for example. Moreover, this is a message about an issue that has no direct relationship to the product being reviewed. And rather than metalinguistically drawing attention to this message, the message is directly incorporated, without any comment from the reviewer, into the review text itself. It is also worth mentioning that this reviewer mixes genres in another way: by including the texts of two complete recipes in her review of her high-speed blender. 4.73 I think the best thing about the 5200 is this: you CANNOT TASTE fresh spinach in ANYTHING. I got mine for Christmas. My husband will not TOUCH anything dark green. As a result of this and just as importantly is his serious illness from a DIET SODA HABIT (five to six cans per day) I had to figure out a way to sneak spinach into his ice cream smoothies. And aloe vera juice, unflavored. And yogurt; he’d never touch them either. Here is a delicous recipe guaranteed to fool ANY picky eater: 1/2 to 1 cup fresh spinach, out of the bag, which I freeze; 1/2 cup unflavored yogurt 1/4 fresh and/or frozen strawberries, partly thawed; 1/4 cup aloe vera juice, UNFLAVORED strawberry ice cream, sugar free. Put in vitamix, blend 5 seconds on one, then turn to ten for 5 seconds. It is delish. ***ASPARTAME KILLS*** For constipation– 1cup mint choc chip ice cream 1 little cup Milk of Magnesia 1/2 cup fresh spinach 1/4 CUP unflavored aloe vera juice Blend as above. ***ASPARTAME KILLS***

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This is an especially interesting example because, as we have observed, online review sites tend to position reviewers, first and foremost, as consumers. Yet, sites such as these could also, in theory, serve as spaces for other forms of social participation, such as activism. In reality, they are rarely used for such purposes (Kuehn 2011). Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out the choice that this particular reviewer made to insert a political agenda into her review, demonstrating what is possible (though not common) to accomplish in the space of the review text. As has been demonstrated, reviewers draw upon a range of existing texts, discourses and generic conventions in constructing their own review texts. This section has illustrated the varied ways in which reviewers make reference to other reviews and to other textual sources, and the different functions that such intertextual references serve. I have shown how some reviewers use intertextual references to others’ reviews as a way to ground their own opinions, either to align with, or to oppose, the evaluations of other reviewers. I have also shown how other textual sources are drawn upon to further inform or educate readers. Not all reviewers will make use of some existing form of artistic expression to undergird their reviews, nor will they insert a political agenda into their review; yet, a handful do opt for these less conventional modes of self-expression. When conceptualized broadly, as I have done here, intertextuality turns out to be common discourse feature of online reviews, and reviewers demonstrate considerable creativity in the types of texts and discourses they draw upon in the construction of their own texts.

Intersection: Involvement and intertextuality Scholars of intertextuality are often interested in how writers and speakers incorporate the voices of others. For example, as Fairclough (2003) points out, ‘for any particular text or type of text, there is a set of other texts and other voices, which are potentially relevant, and potentially incorporated into the text’ (p. 47). Bringing in the voices of others can be conceived of narrowly as various forms of quotation, or reports of prior discourse, such as direct, indirect or free indirect discourse. But this can be also understood as a pervasive phenomenon found in all texts, as Martin and White (2005) explain ‘. . . all verbal communication is “dialogic” in that to speak or write is always to reveal the influence of, refer to, or to take up in some way, what has been said/written before, and simultaneously to anticipate the responses of actual, potential or imagined readers/listeners’

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(p. 92). We have seen earlier how features associated with conversation (discourse markers, questions, etc.) anticipate readers’ responses. I now turn to other forms of dialogism found in online reviews. In the section that follows, I examine how different forms of involvement and intertextuality interact on Epicurious, and how they both contribute to the construction of an online community.

A focus on intertextuality in Epicurious The majority of reviews on Epicurious are necessarily intertextual in a rather obvious sense, since they refer in some way to a previously given text: that is, the recipe.5 In 300 reviews from Epicurious, 161 tokens of recipe appeared, as well as numerous other forms which referred directly to the name of the dish being reviewed. This is evidence that most reviewers remain closely oriented to evaluating the recipe provided on the website. It has been claimed that online reviews of recipes are a type of ‘reactive’ communication, in that ‘they respond to the original discourse, in this case a recipe, and refer only to that discourse’ (Mackiewicz 2008, p. 255). Perhaps this is the case on other recipe websites – or perhaps it was the case in earlier years, when online recipe reviews were a relatively new phenomenon. However, today, recipe reviewers on Epicurious refer to many other texts beyond the recipe review; for example, they refer frequently to texts written by prior reviewers. In fact, over 10 per cent of the reviews on Epicurious refer in some way either to prior reviews or to other reviewers (N43), indicating that this site features a considerable amount of intertextuality, in the sense of reviewers commenting on the contributions of other reviewers. Figure 4.1 illustrates several instances of the word reviews in their linguistic context, and it reveals some interesting trends in the data. One trend that appears is that several reviewers make reference to having read many, lots of or all the reviews of the recipe, which suggests that Epicurious reviewers make use of the existing user-generated information available on this site. This indicates that the individuals who post reviews tend to also read previous reviews, often prior to making the actual recipe. These interconnections between texts, readers, writers and culinary activities demonstrate that Epicurious is a site where participants value, and put to use, the opinions and recommendations of others, and it could be argued that this contributes to a spirit of collaboration and interactivity. Beyond simply reading others’ reviews, often Epicurious reviewers indicate that they have actually followed the suggestions of other reviewers, as can

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… simple ice cream. after reading the [[reviews]] and learning the difference between chi ... ... us and fluffy. After reading lots of [[reviews]] I was curious how these would turn out. ... ... akes were after reading all the glowing [[reviews]]. They tasted too much like baking soda, ... ... and pretty salad. After reading all the [[reviews]] I added 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinega ... ... our house. After reading some other [[reviews]], I made half the recipe and it still ma ... ... batter runny at all, contrary to other [[reviews]]. Will definitely keep this and make it ... ... t would be delicious but like the other [[reviews]] there are many questions to the accepta ... ... eliminate the cayenne pepper. Other [[reviews]] commented that this dish was dry, and I ... ... jam. These are great! Based on other [[reviews]], I cut the sugar down to 1/4 cup in the ... ... e, and it was still great. Based on the [[reviews]], I made six biscuits. When I took them ... ... Doubled the spices as suggested by many [[reviews]]. Used Grand Marnier instead of rum... ... again! Great recipe. I followed the [[reviews]] of others and I sauteed the garlic (fee ...

Figure 4.1  Sample concordance lines for reviews in recipe reviews

be seen in constructions such as: based on the reviews, as suggested by many reviews, I followed the reviews of found in Figure 4.1. In this sense, Epicurious reviewers show that they are not only agreeing with previous reviewers, but also that they have found their suggestions and instructions to be useful – and that they have even chosen to follow those suggestions, as can be seen in the examples below. 4.74 As other reviewers suggested, I used white balsamic vinegar and cut down on the amount of olive oil. . . . 4.75 I read other reviewers, followed their lead. Did only 1/2 the bean layer, 1/2 the oil in pesto, and a packed cup of basil and parsley. McGrane (2007) has suggested that recipe reviews (and other fora on Epicurious) provide a means for individuals to connect with others who share an interest in cooking, perhaps replacing (or complementing) earlier, more traditional, ways of learning about cooking: People share what they know. In the absence of friends or family to teach us recipes or methods, or maybe simply in addition to the community of cooks we value in the physical world, the constructive hypertext becomes a collaborative space to test, interpret, and synthesize cooking knowledge. (p. 159)

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Therefore, on Epicurious, intertextual references made to other reviewers often acknowledge the usefulness of contributions made by prior reviews and signify the reviewer’s participation and membership within the larger community of recipe reviewers.

When intertextuality turns into debate: ‘Who knew tortellini could be so political?’ In online reviews, possible forms of interaction among reviewers vary according to the websites’ architecture. Some review sites feature a built-in space intended specifically for readers to post follow-up comments in response to reviews. For example, it is not unusual on Amazon to find a thread of comments following some reviews in these spaces designed for this type of interaction. Similarly, on TripAdvisor, recent years have seen a growing number of hotel management responses to TripAdvisor reviews. However, not all sites offer this function – and in those cases, when a reviewer wants to respond to another reviewer, he/she is limited to doing so within the body of their own review text. In this section, I take a closer look at one specific example of how some reviews reuse and appropriate the language of other reviewers as they respond to earlier reviews, resulting in a ‘polyvocal’ interaction (Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2011). In addition to denoting references made to other texts (as we have seen in the examples discussed above), intertextuality can also be conceptualized as multiple ‘voices’ being introduced into a text or an interaction. Scholars of intertextuality are often interested in how writers and speakers incorporate the voices of others. The following example shows a series of recipe reviews that are polyvocal in nature, with one reviewer after another referring to, and subsequently building on, the language found in previous reviewers’ posts. These excerpted comments, displayed below in Table 4.4, are organized in chronological order: in other words, older comments are followed by more recent comments. My purpose in doing this – which is actually the reverse order of how they appear on the site (i.e., most recent reviews first, as indicated by the time stamp) – is to show how reviewers literally draw on the words of others and even reuse some of the same language. Therefore, I have deliberately reordered the reviews in the table below to better illustrate the multi-participant, conversational nature of these ‘reviews’ and to show not only how each reviewer builds on ideas expressed by a previous reviewer and responds to them, but also how actual words and phrases are appropriated and incorporated in subsequent review posts. Because the interaction is asynchronous and, in fact, unfolds over a span of several months (as can be seen by the timestamps which indicate the date of posting), repetition

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Table 4.4  Mushroom tortellini interaction from Epicurious Reference to preceding text(s)

ID

Post

A

Make tortellini at home from SCRATCH?! You must be high! There are too many good commercial tortellini’s out there, fresh (refrigerated) and frozen, to mess with this! Sheesh! What a waste of precious time. by A Cook from Three Rivers, CA on 01/28/03

B

Who in the world has the time for this!!! This sounds SO tedious! A: time by A Cook on 01/28/03

C

Looks time consuming, yes . . . but some of us cook for the A: time fun of it . . . if you are looking for fast recipes, epicurious.com A: high might not be right for you. I have thrown several successful dinner parties, and spent many hours in the kitchen, thanks to epicurious.com and might have sipped a little wine while cooking, but was never high. by A Cook from Spokane, Washington on 01/29/03

D

To Washington, AMEN!! by A Cook from NYC on 01/29/03

C: Washington

E

I’m with Washington!! Cooking CAN be fun! If you enjoy cooking then “made from scratch” never enters into the picture. The flavor was awesome and all ingredients were listed. Keep in mind that when making the tortellinis there’s no law that says you can’t make a double batch and freeze one to have when you’re pressed for time in the future! Wonderful! by A Cook from Crystal River, Florida on 01/29/03

C: Washington C: fun A: (made) from scratch A: time

F

This is delicious. I thought the whole idea of viewing recipes C: time on this site was to find the BEST recipes out there, whether consuming that involves timeconsuming recipes, or fun fast ones. If you C: fun do not have the time to spare, or refuse the time it would take, A: time why bother taking the “time to complain” about the time, when instead, you should be “critiquing the taste”, which is what the recipe review is all about! by A Cook from Washington on 01/29/03

G

I’m just puzzled at the reviews from people who give this one star because they think this is a tedious waste of time? This is EPICURIOUS (as in Bon Appetit, Gourmet), not fastfood.com or lazycook.com. I mean, come on. Let’s face it, if you know a little bit about what you are doing, it’s not tough to make food from scratch infinitely better than any commercial food plant. This is an excellent recipe. If you don’t think fresh pasta dough tastes better than packaged, you’re either “taste blind” or you sure aren’t picky. by A Cook from San Diego, CA on 01/31/03

B: tedious A: waste of time C: Epicurious A: make . . . from scratch A: commercial

(Continued)

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Table 4.4  (Continued) Reference to preceding text(s)

ID

Post

H

Absolutely delicious!! Yes, it’s a laborious process to make the filling, and the pasta itself (I made homemade beef broth, as well!). The finished product is so tasty!! (premade pasta may be quicker, but compared to this, it’s soulless. . . .) I don’t have the time and energy to do this every weekend, but for special events, oh yes!!! by A Cook from Tacoma on 02/03/03

I

I have not made this receipt, but it made my day reading these reviews. What a diversity of people we have. by A Cook on 02/04/03

J

I may be biased, since i happen to be a huge fan of any mushroom-based recipe. The comments about being time-consuming are idiotic, as one could pose the same argument with *any* home-maded item. If you don’t enjoy cooking, what are you doing here? If you do, this dish is well worth the effort. by A Cook from Philly on 02/06/03

C: time consuming E: enjoy cooking

K

People who complain that cooking from scratch is “a waste of time” and “tedious” should be making dinner reservations, not tortellini. by A Cook from NYC on 02/20/03

A: from scratch A: waste of time B: tedious

L

I had never tried making my own tortellini and it was a rather exciting process. Much more simple than I had anticipated. I can’t wait to do this again. The ‘opinions’ regarding this recipe had me laughing considerably. Goodness. Who knew tortellini could be so political. by A Cook from Seattle, Wa on 05/22/03

A: time F: delicious

of words and phrases serves as an important cohesive device for readers to be able to interpret what prior posts reviewers are referring to. The interaction I analyse below provides one example of how reviewers transform the normally discrete, stand-alone text of a recipe review, and repurpose it into a forum for interaction, akin to a threaded dialogue found in other forms of online communication. The exchange is initiated by a couple of different reviewers (posts A and B) who give the recipe (for mushroom tortellini) one star and complain that it is ‘time-consuming’ and ‘tedious’. A number of subsequent reviewers then take issue with the critiques that reviewers A and B

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have made and use the majority of their posts to respond directly to these critiques rather than to respond to the recipe itself. What can be seen from the selection of excerpts below is an animated exchange of opinions, as some reviewers agree, and others disagree, with the controversial perspectives introduced by reviewers A and B. Also evident in this online discussion are various beliefs about the primary purpose of the site as well as who its intended audience is. In Table 4.4, the first mention of a word or phrase is indicated in bold. Any subsequent repetition of that word or phrase by another reviewer is later underlined. The final column in the table attributes the repeated item back to its original reviewer. (I did not highlight instances of mushroom or tortellini, since these refer to the recipe, rather than to the reviewer’s comments more specifically.) It is also worth pointing out that besides the exact repetition that is indicated in the table below, there are also other, more indirect references made to the earlier reviewer’s comments. For instance, reviewer A’s phrase commercial tortellini’s out there, fresh (refrigerated) and frozen is later paraphrased as packaged by reviewer G and as premade by reviewer H. Similarly, there are numerous ways in which reviewers refer more generally to the comments of prior reviewers, such as the reviews from people who give this one star (G), these reviews (I), People who complain that . . . (K) and The ‘opinions’ regarding this recipe . . . (L). In this asynchronous conversation, or ‘polylogue’ (Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2011), the polemic begins with a couple of reviewers (labelled in Table 4.4 as A and B), who complain that the recipe is a waste of precious time and tedious, respectively.6 As can be seen in the posts that follow, these words and phrases are later picked up and recycled by a number of subsequent reviewers. In his post, reviewer A levels an accusation of You must be high!, although the target of that accusation remains unclear (e.g., The recipe author? The owner of the site that posted the recipe? Other reviewers who rated the recipe highly?). The posts of subsequent reviewers who respond to reviewers A and B are reproduced in Table 4.4. In these ten comments that follow (C–L), there are numerous intertextual references to preceding posts. In addition, it is interesting to note that while six of these posts make reference to the recipe itself (E, F, G, H, J and L), four of these do not (C, D, I and K), including one (i.e., I) who states explicitly that he did not make the recipe. Therefore, the sole function of the posts of four of these individuals is to respond to others rather than to offer any evaluation of the recipe (which is the intended purpose of the review space). While this type of give-and-take interaction is not actually built into the website’s architecture, these reviewers actively transform the review space and turn it into a forum for discussion.

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From reviewer A’s comments, reviewer C picks up ‘time’ and adds ‘consuming’, thereby re-lexicalizing ‘waste of precious time’. He also responds good-naturedly to A’s accusation of being high: that is, may have sipped a little wine while cooking, but was never high. Next, reviewer D’s response (the most minimal of the 10 comments) consists solely of emphatic agreement (indicated orthographically via capitalization) with reviewer C and is addressed to C directly: To Washington, AMEN. Reviewer E also positions himself as agreeing with C (I’m with Washington!!) and repeats the items fun, made from scratch and the word time in the phrase if you’re pressed for time. The next reviewer, F, also orients to this theme of time, repeating the phrase time consuming, which first appeared in reviewer C’s post. He then goes on to repeat time in four additional places, as well as one repetition of fun, within the same post. Reviewer G opens her post by responding to A and B’s one star reviews and combines their critiques into a single phrase: a tedious waste of time. In addition, she picks up on the phrase (made) from scratch introduced by reviewer A and repeats it. Reviewer G repeats the adjective commercial (from reviewer A) and makes a more implicit reference to reviewer A’s (refrigerated) and frozen tortellini, which she paraphrases as packaged pasta. In a similar fashion, in his post, reviewer H also refers to premade pasta and, like many others, he also repeats the item time. He also repeats delicious which appeared earlier in reviewer F’s comments. Reviewer I makes a different move: rather than agreeing or disagreeing and explicitly affiliating herself with one camp or the other, she instead makes a metalinguistic reference to the ongoing polylogue itself (these reviews) and expresses delight (it made my day) at the various responses (what a diversity), further constructing both writers and readers as a collective (we have). Reviewer J once again picks up the phrases time consuming and enjoy cooking, while reviewer K recycles the phrase from scratch and also makes a direct reference to A and B’s original comments, signalled by quotation marks, about the recipe being ‘a waste of time’ and ‘tedious’. In addition, in their comments, reviewers G and J address reviewers A and B directly (e.g., ‘if you don’t think fresh pasta dough tastes better than packaged . . .’ and ‘if you don’t enjoy cooking, what are you doing here?’), thereby indicating their opinion about the intended audience of this type of website. Similarly, reviewer F’s concluding statement reminds readers about the primary function of the site, that is, to critique the taste of the featured recipe, which is an interesting example of how some reviewers attempt to regulate the behaviours or activities of others. Finally, reviewer L, similar to reviewer I, makes a metalinguistic reference to the polylogue itself (i.e., the ‘opinions’ regarding this recipe) and expresses her

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amusement at having read the comments of other reviewers (had me laughing considerably). This extended example illustrates not only a considerable amount of intertextuality at a micro level (in the reuse and repackaging of the words of other reviewers) in the process of meaning-making, but also reveals insights into the discursive construction of a review community. As Epicurious members transform the intended purpose of review space, join the asynchronous conversation and either agree or disagree with prior participants, they take up positions as certain types of ‘food people’: in doing so, they simultaneously share their views on the purpose of the website and its intended audience. In addition, while the responses of opposition and disagreement range in tone from playful (reviewer C), to didactic (reviewer F), to reproachful (reviewer G: i.e., not fastfood.com or lazycook.com), to hostile (reviewer J: i.e., idiotic), the responses of good-natured humour by reviewers I and L are oriented towards mitigating opposition, in trying to resolve the conflict brought about by differences of opinion. This too, contributes to the discursive construction of an online community.

Chapter conclusions Online reviewers interact on multiple levels with their readers, and they use multiple linguistic resources to do so. They frequently use second-person forms of address and imperatives to suggest, to warn or to qualify their recommendations for their readers – moving beyond providing an impersonal evaluation of a product or service, to a customized, personal and reader-directed text. Sometimes, their comments are addressed to other reviewers who have posted earlier reviews: one example of how involvement and intertextuality can overlap in review texts. Some reviewers use first-person plural constructions to emphasize a sense of connectedness, co-membership or shared experience, while others engage their readers through the use of questions, discourse markers and other resources that simulate the dynamics of conversation. Once again, drawing on resources conventionally associated with other (offline) genres represents another intersection between involvement and intertextuality. Consumer reviewing is a discursive practice, whose products are digital texts. In those texts, reviewers are able not only to communicate directly with other reviewers (as well as with other types of imagined readers), but also to create those texts by making intertextual references to what others before them

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have  written. In some cases, they make allusions to the reviews of others, or repurpose the language from prior reviews. In other cases, they use other textual sources, different communicative genres or even larger discourse systems as foundations for building their own review texts. And even when the website’s architecture does not provide a specific space for an interactive dialogue among users, there are times in which they use the review post itself to engage in a dialogic interaction which can involve resisting, recycling, reworking and responding to the opinions of other reviewers. It has been argued that one of the motivations for posting consumer reviews is because they serve as ‘a way for people to construct social relations, assimilation, identity, or a sense of group coherence in response to the postmodern condition of alienation, isolation, and displacement’ (Kuehn 2011, p. 50). Such an interpretation helps to explain why individuals respond to the larger community of online reviewers in various ways, as well as why they use various involvement strategies to reach out to, and communicate directly with, an imagined community of readers.

5

Digital Narratives of Personal Experience: Narrative Structures and Dimensions

Ordered rice with tea smoked duck for lunch for delivery. Food was good until I found a hair in it. Enough said. (from a Yelp review) As humans, we often ‘story’ our experiences to create a sense of order, or coherence, on what might otherwise seem like a random and chaotic series of events in our lives. Yet, at the same time, when we tell personal stories, those stories often resonate with other individuals as well. Narrative scholar Michael Bamberg (2007) explains that this is because ‘narratives are pre-existing templates that carry social, cultural and communal’ meanings (p. 3). These dual, coexisting properties of narratives (on the one hand, they are about subjective, unique experiences; on the other hand, they reflect broader social scripts, norms and understandings) make them an ideal focus for exploration in online reviews. Each online consumer review offers us a unique and personal account, yet, at the same time, it also offers us insights into some ‘larger, communally shared, practices of sense-making’ (Bamberg 2007, p. 3). Several of these shared practices and shared meanings are discussed throughout this chapter. The concise review that opens this chapter takes the form of a short, compressed story – what we might think of as a ‘micro-narrative’ – and it reveals a norm shared by many restaurant-goers: which is that a perfectly good meal can be ruined by an unfortunate lapse in food preparation hygiene. The main focus of this chapter is on the forms, features and functions of narratives in online reviews. In order to contextualize the analysis, I begin with a brief overview of sociolinguistic approaches to the study of narrative. I propose a cline of narrativity, which can be applied to reviews from all five websites, and I discuss several examples of reviews which illustrate this cline of narrativity. I then turn to exceptional cases: narratives that appear in genres which tend to be mostly non-narrative (i.e., film reviews), as well as other unique narratives,

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which blend features associated with conversational as well as literary registers – building on my discussion of involvement and intertextuality in the previous chapter. I also consider narratives in product reviews from the perspective of narrative dimensions, as opposed to structural features.

Sociolinguistic research on narrative Sociolinguistic research on narratives of personal experience has evolved considerably over the past four decades. Since the publication of Labov and Waletzky’s influential essay on narrative in 1967, and Labov’s subsequent work on narrative syntax (1972), many sociolinguistic researchers have explored various forms and functions of spoken narratives. Initially studied by Labov and other sociolinguists as a vehicle for eliciting individuals’ less self-conscious speech (known as their ‘vernacular’), oral narratives of personal experience have now become the main focus of much linguistic, and other social scientific, research. According to Labov’s model, a narrative consists of six components: an abstract, an orientation, a complicating action, evaluation, a resolution and a coda. The abstract serves as a summary of the narrative. The orientation provides background information and sets the scene. The complicating action consists of a set of past tense, sequentially ordered clauses, and represents the core structure of the narrative. Evaluation, which can appear in any segment of the narrative, encodes the narrator’s stance or perspective on the events being described. The resolution provides some kind of closure to the complicating action. Finally, the coda serves as link, or a bridge, from the past tense of the narrative to the present time of telling. Of these, only the complicating action and evaluation are considered obligatory elements: the remaining elements are optional. Labov’s structural model has been extremely influential in sociolinguistic narrative research. However, it was based on only one type of narrative, told in only one type of context: a first-person, past-tense account of a non-shared experience, told during a research interview. Following several decades of research on narrative from a variety of settings, it became evident that the Labovian model was inadequate when examining a broader range of narrative genres – for example, stories told in more mundane, everyday contexts. In 1997, many of the leading scholars working with narrative at the time, revisited, expanded and challenged various aspects of Labov’s model (Bamberg 1997, special volume of Journal of Narrative and Life History).

Digital Narratives of Personal Experience

Dimensions

139

Possibilities

Tellership

One active teller

Multiple active tellers

Tellability

High

Low

Embeddedness

Detached

Embedded

Linearity

Closed temporal and causal order

Open temporal and causal order

Moral stance

Certain, constant

Uncertain, fluid

Figure 5.1  Narrative dimensions and possibilities (from Ochs and Capps 2001, p. 20)

Around the same time, Ochs and Capps (2001) presented an alternative model, which emphasized different narrative contexts and narrative dimensions, as opposed to the narrative structures. These five narrative dimensions are summarized in Figure 5.1. Ochs and Capps observed that the majority of the narratives that we tell in our daily lives are not well formed or monologic (like the narratives that get told in a research interview) but instead, they tend to be more diffuse, are sometimes co-narrated and often present us with an ambiguous moral stance as narrators work out various possible perspectives and meanings during their telling. Pushing our understanding of narrativity even further, in the mid-2000s, narrative researchers Bamberg (2004, 2007), Georgakopoulou (2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b) and Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008) argued not only for the need to study types of everyday stories that do not conform neatly to the more traditional understandings of narrative, but also for the validity of ‘small stories’ as a narrative genre. This growing research on small stories is especially relevant because it has paved the way for much of the recent research on ‘e-stories’, ‘online narratives’ or ‘digital narratives of personal experience’. To date, researchers have studied narratives in a wide range of CMC genres, including email (Georgakopoulou 2006, 2007a), blogs and wikis (Myers 2010), as well as social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter (Page 2010, 2012), among others. Page (2010, 2012) has argued that new forms of social media and digital communication are reshaping key concepts in narrative. For example, both Myers and Page have pointed out the predominant focus on recency rather than ‘pastness’ in CMC narratives. And Georgakopoulou has observed the

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dynamic interweaving of stories from offline (conversational) contexts back to online (email) contexts. Furthermore, Page (2010) predicts that ‘what counts as story-like’ will need to be revisited, as more and more narrative activity takes place in online contexts. The aim of this chapter, then, is to build on this work on narratives in CMC genres by examining various forms of narrativity in online reviews, drawing on both Labov’s model and that of Ochs and Capps, as well as on more recent insights from research on online narratives. I find the Labovian framework useful for identifying prototypical examples of narrative (an idea that will be developed in the next section) and Ochs and Capps’ dimensional approach useful when considering more specific forms of variation across narratives of the same genre.

A cline of narrativity By virtue of their primary function (i.e., to evaluate and assess a product or service), reviews are clearly evaluative before they are narrative. However, as noted earlier, there is a strong connection between narrativity and evaluation. According to the Labovian model, evaluation is one of the essential components of a narrative. Other narrative scholars also emphasize the importance of evaluation in narrative, for example, Evaluation is held to be the key to narrative; through evaluation, speakers show how they intend the narrative to be understood and what the point is . . . speakers use evaluation to underline the point of a story and [this] evaluative point is either about the teller’s attitude, emotions, or character or is a general point about the way that the world is. (Cortazzi and Jin 2000, p. 103)

While a few online consumer reviews consist exclusively of description and evaluation, many reviewers combine evaluation with some account, or story, of personal experience. When considering narrativity in online reviews, it, therefore, makes sense to think about a cline, or continuum, of narrativity. In other words, some reviews are highly narrative in their structure (i.e., clearly and immediately recognizable as narratives), whereas others consist primarily of evaluation with perhaps only some narrative elements; still others may have few, if any, narrative elements at all. Figure 5.2 illustrates this continuum. This view is consistent with recent narrative scholarship which considers narrative as a ‘fuzzy set’, as opposed to a binary category – with each instance as a more or less prototypical example of the genre (e.g., Page 2012, p. 9).

Digital Narratives of Personal Experience

canonical narrative (clearly narrative)

some narrative elements

141

mostly descriptive + evaluative (few, if any narrative elements)

Figure 5.2  Cline of narrativity in online consumer reviews

Narrative variation In this section, I consider variation in narrative structures in two review types that tend to be quite narrative: reviews of hotels and reviews of recipes.

Hotel reviews In an earlier study (Vásquez 2012), I found that many negative hotel reviews tended to be packaged in the form of a narrative. This is somewhat predictable because a hotel visit unfolds over time and therefore has a temporal dimension. And temporality is a defining feature that appears in nearly all models of narrative. In addition, many of the hotel reviews were highly canonical in their narrative structure as well. This, too, was to be expected, since an account of a negative experience provides a built-in ‘complicating action’. However, one interesting deviation from this structure worth mentioning is that, in some reviews, the narrative’s complicating action was not so much a series of actions or events, but rather it consisted of a set of experiences of the place. Specifically, I observed that In several cases, rather than being comprised of actions and events (as one would expect), the complicating action is instead built up through negative descriptions. In other words, in a hotel review story, a simple listing of unpleasant or negative characteristics (e.g., it is dirty and shabby, it smells, it is gross, the service is bad) can constitute the complicating action: that these characteristics are in conflict with what the reviewer expected to find, when left unstated, remains inferable by the audience. To put it another way, in this particular context and genre of narratives very often it is the overall experience of place itself that comprises the complicating action. (Vásquez 2012, p. 112)

This is one example of how the genre of online reviews (or at least hotel reviews) may be reshaping traditional narrative structures: in this case, a description of a

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series of unpleasant phenomena can substitute for a more specific complicating action. Furthermore, in order for the point of a narrative to be well received and understood by an audience, the participants must share norms regarding evaluation (Cortazzi and Jin  2000, p. 109). Therefore, my point above about the (sometimes unstated) conflict between the traveller’s expectations and the reality encountered once on-site at the hotel also helps to shed light on some of the underlying norms and values that are shared by members of this review community. (These typically have to do with expected standards of cleanliness and service, and about having an experience that is commensurate with the cost, etc.) Indeed, in online reviews, shared norms are often assumed by review writers, though they are generally expressed in tacit ways. The following examples of hotel reviews illustrate the cline of narrativity by providing a contrast between a highly narrative review and one that is situated closer to the other end of the continuum. The first example of a canonical narrative is segmented below in Table 5.1 order to illustrate the traditional Labovian narrative elements (Labov and Waletzky 1967). Evaluation, which can appear anywhere within the narrative, is indicated below with italicized font. (Additional description in the review has been deleted here due to space constraints.) The abstract, an optional component of narratives, normally takes the form of a summary statement that introduces the general topic of the narrative. Similar to email narratives, where the subject line often functions as the abstract (Georgakopoulou 2007a), online reviews are often prefaced with a ‘header’, which also serves as a sort of abstract, and provides the overall gist or tone of the review. Therefore, most review narratives do not include an abstract. However, the example in Table 5.1 is unusual and does begin with one: that is, There were many bad omens that preceded our stay at the [resort name]. The orientation section of the narrative, also optional, provides background information about the story’s who, when and where. Given that stories about hotel stays are often as much about the ‘wheres’ as they are about the ‘whats’, it is very common to find an orientation section in this genre of narrative. The orientation component of online hotel reviews typically consists of reviewers’ reports of their reasons for travel, in addition to when, where and for how long, as well as reference to their travel companions. Furthermore, as can be seen in the example above, the orientation segment in online hotel reviews may also consist of reports of planning activities that took place prior to travel. Since the main purpose of online consumer reviews is to evaluate, rate, describe and, on that basis, to provide recommendations to others for or against a

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Table 5.1  Example of a prototypical narrative from a hotel review (Vásquez 2012, pp. 110–11) Narrative structure

Review text

Abstract

There were many bad omens that preceded our stay at the [resort name].

Orientation

Firstly, I tried to arrange for transport from the panama airport to the resort prior to our arrival. I called the [resort name], long distance and spoke to seven different agents who continuously transferred me to another agent.

Complicating action

In the end, I was reassured that I would be met at the Panama City Airport by a representative from the [resort name]. When my wife and I arrived to Panama City, there was no [resort name] agent there. They put myself and my wife in a room with two double beds (not exactly romantic) instead of a queen or king as we requested. The shower was demon possessed and fluctuated from scalding hot to freezing cold every ten seconds. It was pretty awful.

Resolution

After taxes, my wife and I paid about $320 per night for this place. This was an exorbitant rip off for what we received.

Coda

The only redeeming quality of this place was the nice pools and beautiful beach . . . but you can find this elsewhere for much much cheaper.

particular product or service, it is not surprising to find that all reviews (whether narrative or not) include some form of explicit evaluation. In structural terms, evaluation is one of the two defining features of narratives, and it can occur in any and all phases of the narrative. As seen in the example above, evaluation appears frequently; it is expressed by a variety of lexico-grammatical forms; and it can be found in every section of the narrative. This pervasiveness of evaluation is quite typical of all of the narrative reviews in the dataset. In contrast, the next example falls on the opposite, not-so-narrative, end of the continuum for hotel reviews. This example includes some evaluation, but rather than discuss the author’s unique experience, it instead provides a more general description of the hotel property. In contrast to the previous example, which was a ‘rant’ (negative review), this is an example of a five-star (positive) review. 5.1 Spotlessly clean, a wide variety of amazing food and the staff were all extremely polite and helpful. A huge complex with 4 different swimming

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pools to meet all needs from the slides in the aqua park to the quiet pool with relaxing hammocks beneath the umbrella of palm trees . . . heaven! (Also 2 large pools and the beautiful beach with free sunbeds for hotel residents). Quite a few stairs with small elevators so not very suitable for people with walking difficulties and definitely not suitable for wheelchairs as the ramps very steep. [TripAdvisor] Although this review presumably describes a hotel stay that was experienced by its author, no first-person reference is included. Instead of being constructed as a first-person narrative, the review is presented more as an impersonal description. In addition, there is only one past-tense reference (i.e., were, in the first sentence); the rest of the description is presented in general, verbless or non-finite (e.g., to meet all needs) constructions. Therefore, a review such as this, without much of a temporal dimension, may be characterized as more descriptive than narrative. Finally, the third example shows a review that may be characterized as situated closer to the centre of the narrative continuum. 5.2 we had a one night stay at this hotel – parking at the rear – our room had a lovely balcony with the sun setting as we arrived – Michael at reception took care of the check in details and remembered it was my husband’s birthday – very nice touch. the room was very clean and airy and shower was spotless – enjoyed every minute. Clonakilty was alive at night with music at your fingertips – Shanleys was excellent. breakfast was open style cafe and a nice buzz going – would love to have stayed longer. . . . [TripAdvisor] In the review above, there is a consistent overall past-tense orientation (we had . . . our room had . . . Michael took, etc.). Some first-person references are also included (we, our, my), although some pronouns are elided (enjoyed every minute, would have to loved to stay longer). While not fully prototypical, this example does include several narrative elements (i.e., past-tense orientation, evaluation). Nevertheless, because it does not include a complicating action, it can be considered a less canonical narrative than the example in Table 5.1. In general, positive reviews tend to be less narrative than negative reviews, which have an inherent complicating action of some type. However, the temporal and sequential nature of a hotel experience seems to lend itself to a chronologically organized text in most cases. This results in most hotel reviews falling in the middle-to-canonical range of the narrative cline presented in Figure 5.2.

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Recipe reviews Even though, on average, they are the shortest reviews in terms of their length, recipe reviews generally tend to be quite narrative. Perhaps narratives are common in Epicurious reviews because of the nature of the topic: Cooking is a sequential process, involving multiple steps. Once again, the temporal dimension of cooking seems to support a narrative orientation in review writing. In addition, the dominant emphasis on the outcome, that is, the final result of the recipe, serves as another sort of built-in mechanism for the answer to the narrative’s ‘so what?’ In recipe reviews, reviewers most often (a) describe the steps they followed, (b) discuss any deviations that they took from the original recipe and (c) report on the result of the recipe. In other words, it is typical for reviewers to provide some indication of how the dish described in the recipe actually turned out when it was prepared (i.e., overall evaluation). That said, some recipe reviews remain clearly non-narrative. These also tend to be the shortest in length, as can be seen in the following example: 5.3 Suggestion: If OK with the lamb – I am – adopt Michael Romano’s (of Union Square fame) Matzo Polenta to make it kosher. [Epicurious] This review text (reproduced above in its entirety) contains no narrative elements. Indeed, it could be argued that it contains no review elements either, since it does not evaluate the Braised Lamb dish presented in the recipe. Instead, the ‘review’ text itself is comprised only of a brief suggestion which provides an option for a side dish (i.e., polenta) to serve with the actual dish described in the recipe. This raises an important point: not all reviewers actually provide ‘reviews’ in their online contributions. Instead, some reviewers use the review space to offer suggestions and alternatives. The extent to which this practice is acceptable differs widely from website to website. On Epicurious, it is extremely common to find suggestions and alternatives presented in reviews responding to given recipe. Typically, however, these appear in addition to, and not instead of, the review of the recipe. (In contrast, on other websites, such as TripAdvisor or Amazon, the suggestion of an alternative may be construed as advertising for a competitor, and may be responded to with suspicion, both by the website and by other consumers.) Returning to narrative structures, the next two examples provide an illustration of some of the variation that exists among narratives found in recipe reviews. The first review, though minimal, conforms to the classic structural criteria of

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a narrative. To begin, it is a first-person account – even though no first-person singular pronouns are included in the text. However, it remains inferable from the context that the author is narrating his own experiences. It turns out that this is not an unusual feature of recipe reviews (or other online reviews, as was seen in the semi-narrative hotel review above). While most reviewers do not consistently omit the first-person pronoun throughout the review, it is more common for reviewers to alternate between using the pronoun and omitting it. This may be due to the emphasis on brevity and conciseness in online communication: that is, the most redundant items, or the easiest to recover in context, may be likely candidates for elision or omission. The resulting effect in this example is that the focus of the text is more on the process, the product and on the ingredients rather than on the reviewer/cook himself. 5.4 Followed the previous reviewers recommendation and added more garlic, chicken broth and regular lentils. Tried red wine vinegar, but didn’t like the taste, then tried cider vinegar and loved it. Only put half of mixture in blender, still didn’t like the look or texture. Next time won’t puree any of it. Served with black olives. Well worth making. [Epicurious] The narrative above, from a review of a ‘Lentil Soup’ recipe, begins with a brief orientation. This orientation consists of an intertextual reference to having read other reviews and making modifications accordingly. As discussed in the previous chapter, intertextual references to other reviews help to position a reviewer as a member of the website’s community by constructing the reviewer as someone who reads and values others’ reviews. In this case, beginning with an intertextual reference establishes that the reviewer’s own adjustments and modifications were inspired by those of others (a sort of ‘giving credit where credit is due’). The review continues with a series of narrative clauses, a complicating action – though admittedly a minimal one (i.e., being dissatisfied with the resulting taste, look or texture of the soup) – and a resolution (Next time won’t puree any of it.). In addition, several explicit markers of evaluation (e.g., didn’t like, loved it) are included. Finally, the concluding assessment (Well worth making), which functions as a type of implicit suggestion for readers of the review, simultaneously serves as a coda to the narrative. While this recipe review is clearly recognizable as a narrative, it is, in terms of its tellability, a minimal one. As a review, it is clear, direct and matter-of-fact in its style and presentation; however, as a narrative, it is not particularly exciting, surprising or compelling.

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In contrast, the following review of a Mango Mousse recipe provides an example of a more elaborate review narrative. The genre is the same (i.e., a recipe review), yet it is constructed by the reviewer as a more ‘tellable’ account. In other words, this narrative can be considered more engaging and perhaps more rhetorically effective as well. How does the reviewer of 5.5 accomplish this? Immediately, it is evident that, compared to the previous example, the narrator of 5.5 includes several first-person references as well as more personal information. This reviewer also includes much more detail in the narrative’s orientation section, such as when the reviewer made the recipe (last night), background information about what ingredients were used (I only had 1-1/2 cups of mango “puree” and a scant cup of yogurt), and how the dish was served (Served it in 4 decorative 8 oz. water glasses). 5.5 This was DELICIOUS when I made it last night. It made a huge amount – even though I only had 1-1/2 cups of mango “puree” and a scant cup of yogurt. Served it in 4 decorative 8 oz. water glasses, and I had no place to garnish the dessert, except to place slices of mango around the base of the glasses, so I skipped it. We like our desserts with a bit of texture, so I only smashed 2 very ripe mangos with a fork to make a semi-puree. Used a hand-held electric beater to beat the mango “puree”, sugar, vanilla, and gelatin. The real problem I had was trying to whip my ultra-pasteurized heavy whipping cream: I had chilled everything in the freezer, but after about 10 minutes of beating the cream, it only had soft peaks and was at room temperature (I AM AMAZED IT DIDNT MAKE BUTTER). So I returned it (and the beater bars) to the freezer for about 15 minutes. When I tried to beat it again, I remembered a tip my Mom had given me about 45 years ago: add some sugar when you get to the soft peak stage. I used a couple sprinkles of sugar, and it immediately firmed up. (The point of all this is, that if you cannot get your cream to the firm peak stage, add some sugar.) [Epicurious] The narrative begins with a highly evaluative abstract (This was DELICIOUS when I made it last night). This is followed by a series of orientation and narrative clauses with specific, vivid linguistic choices (e.g., smashed, very ripe mangos), which describe the process involved in making the dessert. Here, the complicating action is presented in far more dramatic terms than in the preceding review: it is described as a problem (The real problem . . .), with the potentially negative outcome indicated via orthographic emphasis (I AM AMAZED IT

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DIDNT MAKE BUTTER), which add to the heightened sense of drama. The resolution of the story comes when the reviewer reveals a piece of advice that she once received from her mother (add some sugar when you get to the soft peak stage). This advice, which is revoiced a second time by the reviewer herself, and framed metapragmatically as advice to readers (The point of all this is . . .) in the final sentence of her review, simultaneously functions as the coda of the story. In online reviews, there is often a tendency for reviewers to close with some type of reader-directed speech act, such as a suggestion, directive, warning, etc. (Vásquez 2011). When situated at the end of a review that is narrative, these speech acts also function as the coda of the story – serving as a bridge from the reviewer’s subjective account of personal experiences to the larger ‘so what?’ relevance for the reader. The main differences between the two recipe review narratives discussed above include the degree of detail included, the number of steps included, the different degrees and amount of evaluation, and the extent to which the reviewer inserted him/herself into the narrative. Although the recipe narratives range from minimal to more elaborated, some type of orientation is common in even the most minimal of recipe review narratives. This includes a discussion about the context of serving the dish, either in the past (e.g., made it for a party . . .) or in the future (e.g., would be a good holiday recipe). Evaluation is another narrative element which varies across recipe reviews. It is nearly always present, and it takes many different forms, as was discussed in Chapter 2. Once again, as discussed in Chapter 2, evaluations in recipe review narratives very often include a mention of who liked or who didn’t like the dish that was prepared. Throughout the dataset of recipe reviews, there are many ‘small stories’ or micro-narratives about the specific actions individuals carried out as they changed the recipe. (In this sense, while recipe review narratives tend to be shorter than hotel reviews, they are more focused on specific ‘actions’; recall that in hotel reviews, the complicating action was often a description of the setting.) Often, narrators describe several attempts at making the dish, with numerous variations to the original recipe. On occasion, some reviewers also comment on what they would do differently in the future: for example, I will not be making this again or next time I will make my standard pancake recipe and add bananas to it. Besides providing readers with cooking tips about alternative ingredients or procedures by including variations, the writer of the review also positions her/ himself as a cook who is skilled, knowledgeable, creative, resourceful, etc., as was discussed in Chapter 3. This trend was also observed by McGrane (2007), who examined the rhetoric of Epicurious and two other cooking sites. She found that

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the majority of reviews of recipes described some sort of recipe modifications, and she interpreted reviewers’ modification of recipes as an act of agency. McGrane describes the spirit of collaboration and participation that pervades how users modify recipes on Epicurious: ‘The community often values the cook’s experiential knowledge over the authority of the recipe. . . . New recipes spring from the site because users make so many substitutions’ (p. 159). This observation and the narratives examined here help us to understand some of the underlying metanarratives of recipe reviews, as well as the larger community values of a website like Epicurious, for example, that recipes are flexible texts; that cooking is a creative process, as opposed to a slavish adherence to a formula; that new knowledge gained in one’s kitchen is meant to be shared with others in the online community; and that community members’ creative adaptations are equally (if not more) valuable than original recipes to other cooks in the community, to name a few.

Exceptional narratives In this section, I begin by considering narratives found in reviews that are usually not very narrative, for example, in film reviews. I provide a detailed analysis of two different approaches to narratives in film reviews: one in which the reviewer writes a ‘story’ about her relationship with a film and another in which the reviewer offers a personal testimonial related to the topic of the film. I offer a contrast with restaurant reviews which tend to be highly narrative. In addition, I highlight how restaurant reviewers sometimes draw on the remote past, a characteristic that is not typically associated with online language (Myers 2010; Page 2010). In addition I describe in detail one restaurant review, which can be considered exceptional in that it falls on the ‘extremely narrative’ end of the spectrum.

Film reviews In direct contrast to hotel and recipe reviews, most DVD reviews on Netflix are not highly narrative. Instead, the majority of reviews on Netflix consist primarily of evaluation, and to a lesser degree, description of the film being discussed. About two-thirds of the reviews in this subcorpus are strictly evaluative; approximately one-third of the reviews include some type of plot summary along with evaluation of the film; and just under 5 per cent of reviews are off-topic

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(e.g., complaints about the quality of the disc itself, as opposed to a focus on its contents). Most film reviews have very few, if any, narrative elements. The following example, a review of a popular action-adventure film, illustrates an exclusively evaluative review with no plot summary. Although it does include some first-person references, there is no clear story of personal experience. 5.6 one of my all time favorite movies. If you watch this film and don’t love the idea, the effects, the clothing and styling then I honestly think there’s something wrong with you. Is it a bit confusing, Yes but is it worth watching again . . . no question about it. [Netflix] This is a rather typical film review from the dataset. While at first glance, it may be surprising that the majority of reviews (like this one) do not include a plot summary, computational researchers, Ghose and Ipeirotis, have pointed out that for reviews of films (which are experience goods), users actually ‘expect to see a personalized, highly sentimental [subjective] positioning, describing aspects of the movie that are not captured by the [objective] product description provided by the producers’ (2011, p. 20). Although narratives were highly unusual in the film reviews dataset, the two narratives discussed below demonstrate that some reviewers did choose to compose review texts in the form of a narrative of personal experience. Whereas the first reviewer uses a personal narrative to write her own experiences and perspectives into her film review, the other example illustrates how the sharing of a personal narrative supersedes the review’s intended function of actually commenting on the film being reviewed. Both reviews are presented in their entirety below. The first of these ‘exceptional narratives’ is a review of a popular romantic comedy. The review has been segmented into its structural narrative elements in Table 5.2. (Evaluation appears in italics.) In this highly narrative review, the reviewer describes her own experience with the film. She begins with her initial impressions based on watching previews of the film (When this movie first came out I was put off by the trailers). She continues by describing her expectations about the film (I thought it would be another Hollywood twist on the truth.). She then presents her unexpected reaction to an initial viewing (I was truly shock at the lesson taught in such a humorous way.), followed by mention of a second viewing (I watched it again with my 16 year old the next day.). This text consists of much more than just an evaluative review of the film. Instead, the reviewer provides a personal narrative of what we might

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Table 5.2  Example of a personal narrative from a film review Narrative structure

Review text

Orientation

When this movie first came out I was put off by the trailers and would not allow my kids to see it because of the theme. I thought it would be another Hollywood twist on the truth. Later I thought I’d be flexible and watch it first to see if it was appropriate for my teens.

Complicating action

I was truly shock at the lesson taught in such a humorous way. Not just in looking at people’s inter-beauty but why Hal had the mind set he had, due to his father’s words. I’m not a Jack Black fan but he really pulled off the character. I watched it again with my 16 year old the next day.

Resolution

And I was pleased at how it really emphasize how society pressures you into believe that looks are important and yet most people know that once you get to know a person looks are usually the last on the list of importance.

Coda

It is a lesson that I have tried to teach both of my kids, to get to know someone before you make judgment rather it be because they are homely, obnoxious, or rude. You never know why a person may appear the way they do to the outside when it could just be a wall they have built to protect themselves.

call ‘her relationship with the film’ and, at the end of the review, she links her narrative about this one experience to a larger set of her family’s values. This review differs from most (non-narrative) film reviews, in that rather than focusing exclusively on the content of the film, the author places herself and her own experiences and perspectives at the centre of the text, as can be seen in the 13 first-person references. Unlike other Netflix reviewers, this reviewer reveals a considerable amount of personal information. In this narrative, the reviewer highlights her moral stance, and through her writing, demonstrates to her audience the kind of parent she is to her two children: one who is concerned about her children’s consumption of media, yet flexible and openminded, and someone who believes it is important to teach her children not to be judgemental. The next example appeared as a review of a documentary. This text (5.7) is quite different in function from the previous example because rather than narrating his relationship with the film, this narrator instead presents a personal story about his relationship with another person. While his story is at least

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topically relevant to the theme of the film itself (Tying the Knot is a documentary that presents a pro-argument for same-sex marriage in the United States), it is important to note that no reference is made to the actual film in this text. 5.7 I never thought that I could ever marry the person I loved. In 2004, I met my soul mate, and we lived together for 2 years until his visa expired and he was forced to move back to Brazil. I could not move there with him, although I was completely willing to drop my entire life and go. The loss was equivalent to experiencing the death of a significant other. I thought the pain of losing the love of my life was all a part of who I was, it was all just something I was going to have to endure for the rest of my life. It is NOT! Now that I am older, and more aware, I realize that that loss was a result of my RIGHTS, as an American and a Human being, being neglected by State. If I was able to marry him, I 100% would have, and he would have gotten his green card. I am an American, born and raised. I only live once, and my rights are being withheld from me! That in itself is a tragedy, a crime against our constitution! It hurt my self esteem, my self worth, for a while but not anymore! I will not let this happen to our next generation of young Americans. We WILL have equal rights! [Netflix] Instead of reviewing the film, the author offers up his own personal story as a sort of testimonial, and, in doing so, he adds his own experience to the voices of individuals who are featured in the film. Although no actual review of the film is provided in this text, the online review site serves as a forum for this particular author to take a stand on an issue that he feels very strongly about. In terms of its purpose, this example is reminiscent of the ‘activist’ approach taken by the author of review 4.73, discussed in the previous chapter. In structural terms, this narrative is also quite canonical, in that it includes an abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation and coda. Both of these Netflix narratives are interesting in what they reveal about the interaction between narratives and the review genre. In the first case, the narrative serves as a resource for the author to personalize her review and to emphasize her personal relationship with the object being reviewed, instead of conforming to the more typical practices of reviewers on this site of offering a much less narrative and much more descriptive assessment of the film. However, in the second, and even more exceptional, case, the author uses the review as a site for providing a personal story as well as a political stance, but offers

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no evaluation, or even mention, of the film itself. His narrative has more of a testimonial function, and in some sense, subverts the intended function of the review as envisioned by the website. Turning from these two exceptional examples to overall trends in the Netflix dataset, about 20 per cent of reviewers incorporated some type of personal information into their texts. In these cases, this personal information is usually quite minimal and does not form the majority of the review (in direct contrast to the two preceding examples). Personal information usually consists of fragments having to do with one’s background somehow relevant to the genre of film, aesthetic and taste preferences, or about their circumstances of viewing. Below are two review excerpts from film reviews that include some personal information. 5.8 I was able to see a pre-screening of this film last night, and all I can say is Wow! My mind hurt after, in a good way, from the level of thought that you are engaged in. [Netflix] 5.9 I loved it! Iam a 38 year old female and i completly ignored the “mom calls” during this movie . . . [Netflix] While these are fragments from reviews which cannot be considered fully formed narratives in the sense of the two previous examples, in their firstperson, past-tense references, the above examples nevertheless lend a slightly narrative flavour to the larger reviews they are part of. Once again, we see the continuum of narrativity in film reviews, ranging from exclusively evaluative and non-narrative, to mostly evaluation and/or plot summary (with some elements or fragments of narrativity), to very few fully formed, canonical narratives. As mentioned, it is quite unusual for reviews of films to take a personal narrative form. And for this reason, it should be emphasized that the two examples discussed above (narratives in Table 5.2 and Example 5.7) represent exceptions. It is likely that the relative lack of narrativity is primarily constrained by the specific genre of reviews (i.e., reviews of films). Because the film itself (typically) presents a story, if a story is recounted in the review text, it is more typically the story of the film’s plot. (And even that is not found in the majority of film reviews.) Furthermore, most film reviews are primarily evaluative. This means that one individual’s subjective impressions of, and responses to, a film

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are more relevant in this genre of review than a story about one’s relationship to the film. Finally, it is also important to remember that film reviews were the most anonymous reviews in the entire corpus: Netflix reviews are not linked to any user ID, user profile or any uniquely identifying information. It is possible that this, too, may impact the perceived relevance of sharing personal experience in the form of a narrative on this particular site.

Restaurant reviews With respect to narrativity, in general, restaurant reviews on Yelp are similar to the hotel and recipe reviews discussed earlier. Because restaurant visits are also events that unfold over time, most restaurant reviews include at least some narrative elements, although, of course, they also tend to be highly descriptive and evaluative. Like reviews on the other sites, there are some restaurant reviews which offer concise evaluations and descriptions with few, if any, narrative qualities, such as the following two examples. (These are the review texts in their entirety.) 5.10 Rather bland and forgettable. The tofu has no flavor, and their Bahn Mi sandwich is criminally bad. [Yelp] 5.11 Outstanding. Try the fire shrimp. [Yelp] At the same time, there are other reviews that are also very brief and concise, yet they do have the temporal dimension expected from a narrative. These narratives may be considered a type of ‘small story’, not unlike those described by Page in her article on narratives in Facebook status updates (2010), although slightly longer. The following is an example of such a narrative: 5.12 I was here when I was 12  years old. I remembered the space immediately upon entering. We sat in the tiled back room. I had yucca for the first time. This time the line was long and the food was less memorable. There was no yucca on the menu. There is a massive lot of free parking. [Yelp] What is interesting about this review is that the first part of it is about an experience that took place in the remote past (at least 6 years prior to the time

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of writing),1 instead of about the author’s most recent visit to the restaurant. This device of referring to the remote past is used to contrast with the more recent experience, which is then discussed in the review’s subsequent sentences. It is not unusual for reviewers to refer to some event or experience in the distant past, which is somehow relevant for understanding their relationship with the product or service being reviewed. Below are two more examples of this phenomenon, excerpted from restaurant reviews. 5.13 I have been dining at the [restaurant name] for over 6 years now. [Yelp] 5.14 I’ve been coming here for years with my parents when I am in town visiting with them and I’ve never been disappointed with my dining experience! [Yelp] Both Myers (2010) and Page (2010) point out that narratives on blogs, wikis and other social media tend to emphasize ‘newness’ and recency, as opposed to ‘pastness’. Online reviewers, in contrast, occasionally do mention their historical connection to a product or service. These references to the remote past serve to emphasize brand loyalty as well as product consistency, both of which may be more specific to the genre of reviews and perhaps less relevant in online narratives found in other genres. And, interestingly, this phenomenon of making reference to the remote past also appears in some of the product reviews on Amazon: 5.15 I have been using a [competitor’s brand] for 26 years. [Amazon] 5.16 [Name of brand] makes excellent products. I have owned this one for about 7 or 8 years [Amazon] 5.17 . . . I will add that my Aunt who is well into her 90s and always advocated good health, has had one of these for as long as I can remember. [Amazon] References to the remote past in online reviews often show up grammatically as present perfect constructions, sometimes accompanied with temporal adverbials (e.g., for over 6  years, for 26  years). In this context of online reviews, such references to the remote past may be useful to reviewers in helping to establish

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their credibility as people who have had an ongoing relationship, and are thus very familiar with the product or business being evaluated. Such claims may be interpreted as rhetorical appeals to ethos, or to a reviewer’s authority to speak on a particular subject (Otterbacher 2011). Page (2012) has pointed out that although the small stories found in social media contexts ‘are not necessarily presented as works of fiction, many of the day-to-day accounts of life experience are selective, artistic, reflective, playful, emotive . . .’ (p. 3). The next example was selected as a particularly noteworthy case of this phenomenon and may be considered an extraordinarily narrative restaurant review. In it, the author shifts between sounding very conversational at times and sounding like a work of literary prose at others, making it an especially engaging hybrid CMC text. The review is not only written in a style that mimics speech, but it also includes several instances of figurative language, such as hyperbole and metaphor, which are more often associated with literary genres. However, one of the things that makes this a particularly ‘tellable’ narrative is the highly conversational tone which results from the use of involvement markers that are typical of spoken discourse, such as discourse markers and second-person address forms, as discussed in Chapter 4 – as well as more typical narrative features such as reported speech and mental states, tense shifts from past to historical present and metapragmatic commentary. In Vásquez (2012), I found uses of similar ‘conversational devices’ in a set of hotel reviews, and I argued that these resources indexed involvement between the author and the audience. I reproduce the narrative below in its entirety, and after that, I provide a commentary on its unique features. The lengthy review begins with discourse marker so, which appears commonly in oral narratives of personal experience. Discourse marker so serves to establish shared background knowledge for the narrator and the addressee (Schiffrin 1989), and as a result, it is used to open the narrative and begin the orientation segment. The second sentence provides an abstract for the narrative and connects the author with the restaurant. The third sentence, another set of orientation clauses, provides further information about the circumstances and the temporal context for the story: So, two doors down from this place is a salon that I was frequenting. Each time I went, I drove by [restaurant name], and decided that I should stop in. I was alone, and it was lunchtime. Then, in the second paragraph, the reviewer does something unusual. The entire second paragraph is a digression into the author’s ‘previous life’ in another city – and another example of a reference to the remote past. Making an

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So, two doors down from this place is a salon that I was frequenting. Each time I went, I drove by [restaurant name], and decided that I should stop in. I was alone, and it was lunchtime. If you’ve read my other reviews, you’ll know that I lived in San Fran for 15 years – but what you don’t know is how lonely it was. I didn’t know a soul when I first moved out there. So, instead of hybernating, I went everywhere by myself. At first it was awkward, going everywhere alone, but I soon learned that exploring a city alone can offer an interesting and unique perspective. No one in San Fran seemed to care that I dined alone, as many other people did. Anyway, back at [restaurant name], ... I rushed through the doors to escape the burning wind chill, and was surprised by the nice layout of the place. I was also surprised by how many employees walked by me before anyone greeted me. I realize I look like I’m wrapped in a giant black sleeping bag, but hey – there’s a person underneath! Hellllloooo.... The place had less than 15 people in it. I began my silent 10 second countdown. If no one greets me, I’ll get my sushi fix elsewhere. Then a cute little asian girl noticed me, and said, “lunch? just you?” Not the brightest of greetings, but at least I’ve been acknowledged. “Just 1, for lunch” I said. Strange, she barely looked at me, just started grabbing at menus and such. She led me past the coat rack without offering my utilization of it, and directed me to my table. “Are you... is anyone else... ” she stumbled on her words as she waved a second menu around. “Just me” I repeated. She walked away as I began stripping off my wintery coat of armor. I guess I’ll go hang it up in the coat rack area, thank you. For the first time in a very long time, I feel the sting of dining alone. Everyone else dined in couples, or groups. Before this day, this had never really bothered me. Yeah, I’m alone, so what? I brought a magazine! Whatever, I wasn’t there to make best friends with the hostess. Waitress. Whatever she was. And now the menu. Nice happy hour selection! Decent prices. The girl comes back over, looking rushed: “do you know what you want?” “no, I just sat down. How about a water?” She rushes off and returns promptly with my water. “Have you decided?” “On your tip? Yes, it’s at about 50 cents right about now”. God it would’ve been cool had I actually said that, but I really said “not yet”. I grabbed the little pencil provided to me and began marking off rolls and nigiri I knew I’d like. What’s this... a Naked Girl Roll? Really? Sooo the chances I might ever bring my father here are out the window. “yeah, I’ll have the Rainbow Roll, and he’ll have the NAKED GIRL ROLL”. Not happening. Who chooses the names of these rolls, anyway? Waitress takes my order, with no eye contact whatsoever. When my food came, I was pleasantly surprised by my plate o sushi. I liked that the nigiri fish extended past each end of the rice, and that my rainbow roll was not exploding with rice (I usually have to tear off all the extra rice most chefs like to pile on). Fish, good. Water glass, filled. Soy sauce, watered down. girl fighting quietly with boyfriend at table behind me, over. Good, now I don’t have to pretend to be reading my magazine. I was done in about 10 minutes. Waitress brings over my bill, looks me dead in the eye, conjures up a big smile, and says “Thank you, so much”. I get it, she’s one of those servers who couldn’t care less about your experience until she remembers the patron might leave a tip. Ugh, if I hadn’t had my 10 year run as a waitress (hey, you can’t be perfect all the time), I’d have left her a dollar. I probably left her just under 15%. The little guy running around in a tie (manager, maybe?), who had passed me by several times, glanced briefly from his very busy task of folding napkins, and said, “b’bye now”. Too bad, this place could be rackin’ in the cash (or at least, MY cash) if their service was a touch more cordial. I swung the last of my mile long scarf around my neck, and left without feeling much of anything, except still a little hungry.

Figure 5.3  A highly narrative restaurant review

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intertextual reference to her own reviews, she not only draws attention to her status as a Yelp contributor (as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4), but she also addresses the reader directly and makes a move to establish common ground (If you’ve read my other reviews, you’ll know that I’ve lived . . .). These secondperson pronominal references, used as an involvement device to address her audience (you’ll know . . . but what you don’t know . . .), are then followed by several sentences of reflection on her past experience that are relevant to her current narrative about dining in a restaurant alone. As she draws the second paragraph to a close, she metapragmatically references her own digression by bringing the reader back to the physical location of where the narrated events took place: Anyway, back at [restaurant name] . . . The third paragraph opens with several narrative clauses describing her entry into the restaurant and her initial impressions and experiences. Towards the end of this paragraph, the reviewer sets up a dialogic interaction that will run throughout the rest of the narrative. This dialogue consists of representations of speech (her own, as well as that of the restaurant employees with whom she interacts) and representations of her thoughts and other mental states. While the inclusion of direct quotations or representations of speech is not typical of most reviews, it is a feature that does appear occasionally, though usually only as a single utterance. In contrast, in this highly narrative review, the representation of speech and thoughts is the primary discursive device that moves the narrative along in time, and the reviewer’s repeated use of it contributes significantly to the resulting conversational quality of the text. Table 5.3 illustrates the dialogue taking place in the story. These dialogic bits are interspersed with narrative clauses, most of which are marked for past tense. (Represented thoughts, in contrast, are expressed using present tense, as can be seen in lines 1 and 2, in Table 5.3.) Although the quotations in lines 10 and 11 (Table 5.3) are not prefaced by a quotative frame and are not directly attributed to a particular speaker, the speakers are inferable from both the situational and the co-textual context. While the narrative has a definite conversational quality, at the same time it also has a literary quality. This turns up in the reviewer’s use of metaphor (e.g., my wintry coat of armor) as well as in her choices in verbs of quotation (stumbled over her words, repeated), which reveal greater variety – and more use of lower-frequency verbs – than is typically found in informal spoken discourse (Biber et  al. 1999). In addition to the represented thoughts that appear in the narrative, there are other instances of clauses which might be best characterized as ‘free indirect discourse’, a literary term which refers to a mode

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Table 5.3  Representations of speech and thought in restaurant review narrative Line

Speaker

Speech/ Thought

Quotative frame

 1

Reviewer

Thought

I realize

I look like . . . Hellllloooo . . .

 2

Reviewer

FID

None [present tense]

If no one greets me, I’ll get my sushi fix elsewhere.

 3

Waitress a cute little Asian girl

Speech

said

“lunch? just you?”

 4

Reviewer I

Speech

said

“Just 1, for lunch”

 5

Waitress She

Speech

stumbled on her words

“Are you . . . is anyone else . . .”

 6

Reviewer I

Speech

repeated

“Just me”

 7

Reviewer

FID

None [present tense]

I guess I’ll go hang it up in the coat rack area, thank you.

 8

Reviewer

FID

None [present tense]

Yeah, I’m alone, so what?

 9

Waitress The girl

Speech

None [quotation marks]

“do you know what you want?”

10

Reviewer

Speech

None [quotation marks]

“no, I just sat down. How about a water?”

11

Waitress

Speech

None [quotation marks]

“Have you decided?”

12

Reviewer

Hypothetical Speech

None [quotation marks]

“On your tip? Yes, it’s at about 50 cents right about now”.

13

Reviewer I

Speech

really said

“not yet”.

14

Reviewer

FID

None [present tense]

What’s this . . . a Naked Girl Roll? Really?

15

Reviewer

Hypothetical Speech

None [quotation marks]

“yeah, I’ll have the Rainbow Roll, and he’ll have the NAKED GIRL ROLL”.

Utterance

(Continued)

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Table 5.3  (Continued) Line

Speaker

Speech/ Thought

Quotative frame

16

Reviewer

FID

None [present tense]

Who chooses the names of these rolls, anyway?

17

Waitress Waitress

Speech

says

“Thank you, so much”.

18

Manager little guy

Speech

said

“b’bye now”.

Utterance

of writing that grants the reader a metaphorical access into the thoughts of the speaker. Some examples include 5.18 Who chooses the names of these rolls, anyway? 5.19 Good, now I don’t have to pretend to be reading my magazine 5.20 Ugh, if I hadn’t had my 10 year run as a waitress (hey, you can’t be perfect all the time), I’d have left her a dollar 5.21 Too bad, this place could be rackin’ in the cash (or at least, MY cash) if their service was a touch more cordial. This device enables the reviewer/narrator to ‘share with’ readers her more internal states such as thoughts, emotions and feelings. In an earlier study of discourse features in online reviews (Vásquez 2012), I observed that whereas the representation of speech was conventionally bounded by quotation marks, the representation of thoughts was usually not marked off in this way. In this particular review, we do see a few instances of represented thoughts prefaced by a mental verb (e.g., realize); however, more often they are indicated simply by a shift from past to present tense. Also, on occasion, instances of free indirect discourse (abbreviated as FID, in Table 5.3) are comprised of questions (e.g., lines 8, 14, 16 in Table 5.3), which serve as another reader involvement strategy, as was discussed in Chapter 4.

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As can be seen in the table, in this narrative there is considerable movement from turn-taking in the represented interaction between the waitress and the reviewer, back to the thoughts of the reviewer. The represented interaction begins in paragraphs three and four, with a couple of examples of free indirect discourse from the narrator (I realize . . . If no one . . .), which function as representations of her thoughts. These are followed by the server’s utterance, acknowledging the author’s presence in the restaurant: lunch? just you? The narrator’s response of just  one for lunch is preceded by what might also be considered free indirect discourse, her inner assessment of the server’s greeting: Not the brightest of greetings, but at least I’ve been acknowledged. The awkwardness of this interaction is highlighted as a second conversational question – answer sequence, or adjacency pair, is presented, with the waitress asking Are you . . . is anyone else . . . and the author’s repeated response Just me. The represented dialogue continues, with the waitress inquiring if the author is ready to order Do you know what you want? and the author’s non-affirming reply of No I just sat down. Once again, this is followed by a repeated question – answer sequence, beginning with the server’s Have you decided? However, this time, the author’s actual response of Not yet is preceded by a hypothetical response On your tip? Yes. . . . That this response is only imaginary is explicitly stated by the narrator: God it would’ve been cool had I actually said that, but I really said. . . . This dialogic exchange is followed by the narrator’s musing over (what she considers to be) an inappropriately named sushi roll: a Naked Girl Roll? Really?. This is presented as imagined speech, as she further envisions ordering this item while dining with her father (‘yeah, I’ll have the Rainbow Roll and he’ll have the NAKED GIRL ROLL.’), and as free indirect discourse: Who chooses the names of these rolls anyway? As the narrative comes to a close, the reviewer provides a representation of thanking by the waitress, and in the final paragraph, the dialogue ends with the representation of a leave-taking expression from the manager (‘b’bye now’). This is followed by a reflection from the narrator and the narrative’s resolution: the reviewer’s exit from the restaurant. With the depiction of the actions of the narrator (the swinging of her hyperbolic mile-long scarf) contrasted with a feeling of emptiness, the final sentence has a literary quality and reads like the conclusion of a creative work, such as a short story. This is certainly one of the most polyphonic, or ‘multi-voiced’, reviews in the dataset, with its numerous representations of speech of multiple participants represented throughout this narrative. The dialogic nature of narratives in online ‘rants’ has been discussed by linguistic anthropologist Manning (2008), who

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refers to online texts similar to this as one ‘imagined conversations’. Represented speech or ‘constructed dialogue’ (Tannen 1999) serves as a type of involvement strategy to engage a reader in the author’s narrative. The above example once again illustrates how the narrator can use a range of discourse features (i.e., reported speech/mental states, discourse markers, second-person address forms) to immerse a reader into the story world of the narrated experience. Page (2012) also notes that these, along with other, discursive devices (such as comparators and intensifiers) serve to ‘project connection between narrator and audience’ (p. 195). Finally, it is worth emphasizing that this is truly an exceptional review, not only in its length and degree of narrativity, but also in its careful construction and crafting. Of all of the review sites, Yelp reviewers are perhaps most characteristic for having unique authorial voices. Indeed, the site’s instructions encourage reviewers to write reviews that are ‘insightful, engaging and personal (aka useful, funny and cool!)’. Moreover, it is possible that some reviewers approach their review writing as an aesthetic practice. For example, Kuehn (2011), who interviewed a sample of Yelp reviewers, found that many Yelp reviewers had creative writing backgrounds and that they consider their review writing to be a creative outlet and a form of escape from their dull work lives.2 While the background and occupation of this particular reviewer of the sushi restaurant are unknown, factors such as these may perhaps account for the highly engaging quality and the partially conversational/partially literary flavour of this reviewer’s restaurant narrative. By her self-reference to her previous reviews, she not only constructs herself as a writer, but also reveals her assumption that her prior reviews may have already attracted an audience of readers.

Applying Ochs and Capps’ narrative dimensions I now turn to Ochs and Capps’ framework and consider online review narratives in terms of narrative dimensions. To briefly explain the five dimensions that were introduced earlier in Figure 5.1, the dimension of (1) tellership refers to whether there is one primary teller of the narrative or whether there are multiple active co-tellers; (2) tellability refers to both ‘the significance of the narrated experience and the rhetorical style in which it was related’ (Ochs 2004, p. 82); (3) embeddedness refers to how detached or embedded the narrative is in relation to the context which surrounds it (i.e., the extent to which the

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narrative gains meaning from its association with prior discourses); (4) linearity refers to the way in which the sequence of events in the narrative is organized (i.e., the events related in a narrative may be presented in a more or less linear fashion) and finally, (5) moral stance refers to the perspective or framework for interpreting the moral meanings associated with events in the narrative. Page (2012) has noted that all of these dimensions are variously constrained by different forms of social media ‘in innovative ways that have yet to be explored’ (p. 11). This  segment of the chapter, therefore, offers an initial exploration of how narrative dimensions appear in online review narratives. In the section that follows, I begin by referring to some of the already discussed narratives to illustrate the five narrative dimensions. Just as is true of face-to-face narratives, the dimension of linearity can be variable in online review narratives as well. Stories can follow a conventional chronological sequence, or the order of events can be presented in alternative ways. To illustrate this, in Mango Mousse (Example 5.5), there is an observed shift in linear order from that which is conventional. In other words, the order in which actions are presented is not analogous to the order in which they took place: in the review text, the author mentions garnishing and serving the completed desert first and later describes the steps which were taken to create it. In contrast, in Garlicky Lentil Soup (Example 5.4), the order of steps described seems to closely follow what actually transpired during the soup-making process, and this sequentiality is achieved with the use of temporal adverbial markers such as then. While online review narratives vary on the dimension of linearity, more often than not, the organization of the majority of narrative reviews appears to follow the chronological order of events in the way that they were experienced. Next, the dimension of embeddedness refers to how enmeshed or detached a narrative is with respect to its surrounding context. Every narrative is told in some existing, given context. In terms of their genre-related context, all online review narratives are ‘embedded’ in the sense that they appear on an established website. Of course, the purposes, values and community practices vary from website to website – and this reality shapes the narratives that are produced on each site. However, embeddedness in online reviews can also be thought of more broadly, for example, the extent to which the narrative draws on elements of the surrounding discourse (e.g., previous reviews, or even other offline texts that are relevant to the item being reviewed). In this sense, various forms of intertextuality (that were discussed in Chapter 4) are related to a particular review text’s embeddedness.

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Tellability has to do with the impact the narrative makes on its audience. Although some part of tellability is impossible to discern without exploring audience reactions to the story, Page (2012) helpfully explains that tellability also involves ‘what makes a story worth telling . . . judged against locally negotiated demands of relevance . . . rhetorical effectiveness and interpersonal engagement’ (p. 16). Put simply, some stories ‘involve’ their readers more than others. For example, the sushi restaurant reviewer (in Figure 5.3) used a number of involvement devices (such as second-person address, reported speech, etc.), so her narrative may be considered more tellable than many other review narratives. Similarly, the Mango Mousse review can be considered a more tellable account, when compared with the Lentil Soup review, with respect to the degree of detail, elaboration and personal information included by the reviewer. Inevitably, as readers, we perceive some online review narratives to be more engaging than others. Ultimately however, whether a story is a tellable one or not will be determined by the receiver, or the audience, for that story. As I explained near the end of Chapter 3, how a text is interpreted depends on the individual reading it – and this extends to the reader’s reception of a review narrative as well. Whether we find a particular story compelling, whether a specific narrative resonates with our own experiences and whether we appreciate and approve of a narrator’s stylistic choices are subjective judgements and aesthetic responses that are likely to vary from reader to reader. Tellership in face-to-face narratives has typically referred to whether the narrative is told as a monologue, or whether it is co-constructed, with more than one individual contributing to the telling of the story. Given the asynchronous CMC format of this genre, reviews can be regarded as ‘digital monologues’. The author is the sole narrator and, for the most part, each review functions as a stand-alone text. Of course, this is something that may not be true of all digital genres – and, of course, the potential for various forms of tellership will vary ‘according to the textual infrastructure of the social media genre in question’ (Page 2012, p. 18). However, a different way of conceptualizing tellership is related to the representation of others’ voices in the story, including phenomena such as revoicing and polyphony (Ochs and Capps 2001). In other words, this refers to the extent to which other people’s voices are represented in a review narrative. For example, the Lentil Soup review (Example 5.4) is monologic, in that only the author’s voice is present. In contrast, in the Mango Mousse review (Example 5.5), we saw how the author of the review ‘revoiced’ her mother’s words twice in the same review: first through an indirect report of her mother’s advice to her, and later – invoking her mother’s words, yet

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speaking ‘as herself ’ – to readers of her review. And the Sushi Restaurant review (Figure 5.3) is highly polyphonic, as the author, through direct quotations, ‘animates’ the voices of the server and the manager, as well as her own words and thoughts. Similar to embeddedness, the dimension of tellership overlaps significantly with intertextuality (the topic of the previous chapter), in that both can refer to the words or voices of other individuals finding their way into the text of the review narrative. The final narrative dimension is moral stance. The opposing poles of this dimension are a certain, constant stance held by the narrator on one end, or an uncertain, fluid moral stance on the other. The first hotel review (Table 5.1) is an example of a narrator with a certain constant stance: the review begins with a focus on the negative experience and concludes with the reviewer encouraging readers to stay elsewhere. Another example of a consistent moral stance can be seen in the review of the documentary about same-sex marriage (Example 5.7), in which the narrator maintains a consistent attitude towards his own experiences as well as how they illustrate the larger social issue under debate. At the opposite end on the narrative dimension of moral stance is the narrator of the sushi restaurant review (Figure 5.3), whose perspective on her experience wavers at times from positive to negative to indecision. Similarly, the moral stance in the Netflix romantic comedy review narrative (Example  5.6) fluctuates, as the narrator sets up her review by explaining why she was prepared to have a negative response to the film, followed by an explanation of why she changed her mind later. She admits that she initially had negative preconceptions about the film’s message, and she did not want her children to view it. In addition, she claims not to be a fan of the film’s major actor. However, by the narrative’s conclusion, she changes her perspective about all of these points. Often, the dimension of moral stance is also related to how the reviewer constructs their identity: in this particular case, as a parent and as a consumer of popular media. The contrast between a reviewer’s expectations and the reality encountered, as briefly mentioned in Chapter 2, turns out to be a common theme in narrative reviews for other types of products as well, as will be discussed next.

Product reviews In this section, I apply Ochs and Capps’ (2001) narrative dimensions framework to the discussion of product reviews found on Amazon. Specifically, I analyse narratives of different product types: high cost (high-speed blender), medium

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cost (diaper bag) and low cost (tea) items. Like the other types of reviews I have discussed, product reviews can also be characterized as falling somewhere on a continuum of narrativity: Some include narrative features, whereas others are comprised almost exclusively of evaluation and description. The following discussion considers a few ‘prototypical’ review narratives from the perspective of the five narrative dimensions. The review below (5.22) provides an example of the expectation-contrast structure mentioned above. This reviewer begins with positive assumptions about the products’ performance (. . . everything was going great, so I thought.) but quickly shifts to a narrative about a negative experience with the product, thus indexing a shift in moral stance. In terms of tellership, only one voice is presented in this narrative (i.e., that of the narrator), and its overall structure seems to be quite linear, with temporal relations signalled clearly with a series of past tense verbs, and adverbial markers of time, such as when, then and after. What makes this story a ‘tellable’ one is the complicating action of finding rubber dust from the machine in the peanut butter made by the product. However, with the exception of a few features (i.e., the use of all caps, MAJOR FLAW, and one exclamation point), the narrative is presented in a fairly straightforward fashion, with the narrator concentrating more on the mechanical facts of the presumed design flaw (e.g., metal parts in frictional contact . . . metal axle of the blade . . . the black rubber o-rings) rather than on his personal and emotional reactions to the experience. 5.22 I tried making peanut butter with my brand new [product name] and everything was going great, so I thought. When I finished blending the peanut, I opened the jar to scoop it out. Then, I noticed black bits my nut butter. I wondered if it was burnt peanuts because the process does get kind of hot. After closing inspection, I realized that those black bits were pieces of the rubber o-ring! I ended up having to throw away all the beautiful nut butter I’d just made. When I examined the jar, I could see the rubber o-ring under the blade, slipped up and out of position. This made me realize a MAJOR FLAW with the jar design. It has metal parts in frictional contact with rubber o-rings. When the blade spins lightning fast, this introduces the very real possibility of the metal creating microscopic rubber “dust” and/or bits from grinding of the metal axle of the blade with the black rubber o-rings that are supposed to keep the jar from leaking.

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A contrast in tellability can be seen in the following example, another narrative review of the same product. 5.23 Someone named Laura wrote a review saying her [product name] quit after 10 smoothies, and that she guessed this was a fluke. Well, you’re not the only one. I spent £497 on a [product name] Total Blender with one of the [product name] BPA free jugs from a UK distributor. 10 days, 10 smoothies, the motor died dramatically with a spark, smoke and tripped the breaker, turning off every outlet in the house! That’s right folks, £49.70 per smoothie! And to think I bought the thing to save on the smoothies I was buying! Now I’m dealing with the whole headache of trying to get them to fix or replace it. I bought the blender in part because of all the youtube videos singing it’s praises, but if you notice, Robyn O when she’s comparing the [product name] and [competitor brand] says that “if you have a problem, [competitor brand] will fix your blender no questions asked.” She doesn’t say the same about [product name], and there is a very good reason for this omission! On the blender’s performance, the whole idea behind the green smoothie is that you can get some greens into your diet without noticing them in your fruit smoothie. For me, on the higher powered of the 2 smoothie settings, I made a few green smoothies with a relatively minimal amount of kale (less than 1/6 of the smoothie), and I definitely noted the chunks of kale still in it. I honestly think you could and should do better. In this review, the author creates a somewhat more tellable account by means of multiple forms of direct address to his audience (e.g., you’re not alone, you could and should do better,), discourse markers and other forms associated with conversation (Well, That’s right folks), an exciting complicating action (i.e., 10 days, 10 smoothies, the motor died dramatically with a spark, smoke and tripped the breaker, turning off every outlet in the house!), irony (. . . £49.70 per smoothie! And to think I bought the thing to save on the smoothies I was buying!) and multiple instances of emphatic punctuation (!). Furthermore, the narrator presents a consistent moral stance: one of clear dissatisfaction. The narrative is nonlinear, in that the reviewer presents events in a different order from that in which they occurred. He begins with the story’s complicating action (i.e., the blender’s motor ‘dying’) in the first paragraph, but then in the third paragraph he discusses how he had made green smoothies prior to this event.

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In terms of tellership, there is one primary teller; however, others’ voices are also invoked. Specifically, in the second paragraph, a spokesperson from an online video, who compares the reviewed product with that of its main competitor, is quoted directly (Robin O . . . says that . . .). Here, the intertextual reference, in the form of the spokesperson’s words, is used to support the reviewer’s implicit claim about the superior customer service that is provided by the product’s competitor. In addition, immediately at the opening of the narrative, another intertextual reference is made to a prior reviewer’s similar experience (Someone named Laura wrote a review . . .). In establishing that the reviewer’s experience has been shared by at least one other consumer, the intertextual embedding of this narrative serves to validate this particular reviewer’s account. The reviewer also alludes to other online texts (i.e., youtube videos): I bought the blender in part because of all the youtube videos singing it’s praises. Though it describes a uniquely experienced event, this narrative is positioned within a wider landscape of online narratives about the same product (i.e., embedded within a set of preexisting texts and other prior discourses) and offers a counter-narrative to other texts which unequivocally ‘sing its praises’. These two narratives of the very same product highlight a number of different ways in which online narrators can ‘story’ their consumer experiences. Clearly, both narratives are ‘tellable’, given that they report on unexpected malfunctions of a rather expensive product. However, the way in which each reviewer presents his story is quite different. The first account is a more introspective one (and includes no second-person address forms), while the second account is a much more ‘involved’ one (i.e., the author uses six second-person address forms, and thereby includes the audience into the narrative of his experience). Temporality is also treated differently, with the first narrative presented in a more linear fashion than the second. There is also a contrast in terms of embeddedness, with the first review appearing as relatively more detached, and the second review – with its inclusion of several intertextual references – as more embedded in other texts about the product. In terms of tellership, the first review presents a more monologic account than the second review, with its quoting of other voices. Finally, both narrators construct a unique moral stance: the first shifts from positive to negative, though maintains a more objective point-of-view in the detailed technical description of the product’s mechanical failure, whereas the second maintains a consistent sense of dissatisfaction in his impassioned account of his overall disappointment with the product. In the next review, we see an example of the narrator’s shifting moral stance. This example, a review of a diaper bag, follows the expectation-contrast

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structure as in several narratives previously discussed; however, it reverses the typical order of how semantic valency is presented. The author’s initial disappointment (my first thought) later turns to satisfaction (I absolutely love it), which is contrary to the typical expectation-contrast structure, where positive expectations are followed by an encounter with an unsatisfactory reality. Like most review narratives, this narrative includes several words and constructions which explicitly evaluate the product reviewed (e.g., way too large, love it, I also like, very nice item, I’m pleased). 5.24 When this bag came in the mail, my first thought was that it was way too large. It was my own fault for not reading the dimensions correctly. However, after having used the bag for over two months now, I absolutely love it. I use it as my purse and diaper bag. For the price, it’s pretty durable. I’ve caught the bag on corners and fully expected to find a rip. But the bag has held up well. The material doesn’t stain very easily which I also like. It would have been nice to have more partitions inside since the bag is so large. However, I just learned to put my stuff in smaller bags within the bag and that works well for me. The bag has plenty of smaller pockets on the outside. There are two open side pockets, a pocket in the back that has a Velcro latch, and a larger zippered pocket in the front. The larger front pocket also has a mesh compartment in it. There are no pockets on the inside of the main bag, but there are straps where you can put bottles. The bag also comes with a changing pad and a wipes holder. All in all, it’s a very nice item and I’m pleased with the quality and design. Although this review can be considered a narrative, it is a minimal one, since the text is comprised of much more description than narration. The most narrative segment appears at the beginning of the text, and it is presented in a linear fashion. It is a univocal text with the only voice and perspective belonging to the author. It is also a relatively detached narrative, in that no references are made to other texts. As a positive review, it is not an exceptionally tellable account. In contrast, the next example, a negative review of tea, appears to be a much more tellable narrative. In 5.25, the use of multiple rhetorical questions, the use of emphatics (really positive, just awesome) to express evaluation and the use of all caps for emphasis (RUBBISH, WILL NEVER BUY FROM THEM!) mark this narrative as much more involved, as well as tellable, than the preceding example.

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5.25 First time I bought this tea it was really positive experience – the tea was just awesome. So I decided to order 4 cans more. And know what? They sent me something, which is not what I expected. The bags were not vacuum-sealed, the flavor gone, taste like hay. RUBBISH. What are they thinking of there? Selling total crap for top money? I saw the same experience here in a review, the bags were not sealed, no jasmine flavor. So you see Im not alone. WILL NEVER BUY FROM THEM! Whereas the previous example (5.24) offers a great deal of description of the product, this review consists almost entirely of evaluation. Yet, this example feels more narrative than the previous example, largely because of the primary pasttense orientation. Similar to the previous example, the author of the tea review above also shifts moral stance by beginning with a positive experience and then following that with a negative evaluation. Also, there is a single teller, with a single voice represented throughout this narrative. Unlike 5.24, however, this text is embedded in other texts about the same product (I saw the same experience here in a review. . . . So you see Im not alone.). And similar to the reviewer in 5.23, the reviewer here uses this narrative embedding (i.e., the intertextual reference) to underscore the non-uniqueness of her experience (Im not alone), thereby adding credence to her account. When considering Ochs and Capps’ five narrative dimensions and applying them to this genre of online narratives (summarized in Figure 5.4), moral stance and linearity are perhaps the most similar to narratives told in faceto-face contexts. What I mean is that with moral stance and linearity, there is considerable variation across individual narrators in online review narratives, just as in spoken narratives. Similarly, in online reviews, tellability also varies considerably across individual narratives. Different reviewers, who describe their experiences with the same or similar products, can choose to construct their personal account of experience in a highly engaging way using a wide range of discursive resources – or they can present their account in a manner that is less compelling or even unremarkable. Tellability has to do with both the aesthetic properties of a narrative and its rhetorical effectiveness and appropriateness in the given context. In this online context, various discourse features may contribute to a narrative’s tellability: these may include the use of emphatic language and/or orthography, exaggeration/hyperbole, metaphor, involvement strategies (secondperson pronouns, rhetorical questions, reported speech), markers of orality (discourse markers, slang), among others. Ultimately, however, a narrative’s

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Dimensions Moral stance Linearity

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Possibilities Certain, constant Uncertain, fluid highly variable in review narratives: similar to FTF narratives Open temporal and Closed temporal and causal order causal order highly variable in review narratives: similar to FTF narratives

Tellability High Low “what makes a story worth telling […] judged against locally negotiated demands of relevance […] rhetorical effectiveness and interpersonal engagement” (Page, p. 16): similar to FTF narratives Tellership One active teller Multiple active tellers “varies according to the textual infrastructure of the social media genre in question” (Page, p. 18): different from FTF narratives Detached Embeddedness Embedded “what counts” as ‘surrounding context’ in online environments? (e.g., textual, online, offline, etc.) (Page, pp. 14–15): different from FTF narratives

Figure 5.4  Ochs and Capps’ (2001) narrative dimensions and possibilities for conversational, or face-to-face [FTF] narratives, adapted for online review narratives. (Informed by ideas in Georgakopoulou 2006a and Page 2012)

tellability is determined by the recipients of that narrative (Georgakopoulou 2006a). Individual readers may use different sets of criteria for judging these narratives as more or less ‘tellable’. Whereas in spoken contexts, narratives may be co-constructed by multiple tellers participating, tellership may be understood slightly differently in this particular CMC genre, since there is normally only one author per online review. Therefore, tellership in online review narratives is primarily monologic, with the narrative constructed by the person with first-hand experience of the narrated events. However, as was shown in a number of examples, others’ voices can be brought in (often in the form of reported speech, or in references to the opinions and viewpoints of others who also participated in the events along with the reviewer) to help narrate the text, resulting in narratives which are in some cases, dialogic or even polyphonic. Finally, narrative reviews are embedded in other discourses. As was shown in Chapter 4, many of these texts refer to prior texts, earlier interactions, as well as pre-existing texts from other genres altogether. So while, in some sense, these

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stories may exist as ‘stand-alone units’ (i.e., as a stretch of discourse written by a single author, which presents an account of a uniquely experienced event or product), many of them are also embedded in a number of other pre-existing texts and prior interactions. Most obviously, they appear on a particular website which represents the narrative’s immediate discourse surroundings. However, as was discussed above, the product reviews revealed a range of intertextual references to both online and offline texts and interactions. Many of these intertextual references are used by reviewers as a form of additional evidence or further support for their overall assessment of a product.

Chapter conclusions Narratives enable individuals to order, explain and take a position on a particular experience (Georgakopoulou 2006a). Some authors of online reviews chose to ‘package’ their review in the form of a first-person, past-tense account of their experiences, while other reviewers instead choose to offer their readers more impersonal descriptions, evaluations and suggestions. Within the narratives found on the review sites, there exists a broad range of narrative structures from the ‘smallest’ micro narratives, which include some personal reference and a temporal structure, to larger, more developed narratives, some of which simultaneously make use of some features conventionally associated with more spoken types of discourse, or even those associated with more literary genres. It is perhaps most accurate to say that the majority of reviews fall somewhere in between these two extremes of narrativity and are comprised of a combination of some narrative features as well as some non-narrative features. Narrators exploit various affordances of this medium of online reviews to produce novel and creative accounts of their past experiences. However, the production of narratives in this genre is clearly constrained by the types of activities being reported. In particular, the nature of the product being reviewed interacts with the extent to which reviews tend to have features of narrativity or not. For example, those experiences that have a sequential, durative dimension – that take place over time, and that have a series of steps or stages (i.e., hotel stays, restaurant visits, recipes) – seem to lend themselves to more narrative accounts. The experience of watching a film, in contrast, centres around the film itself, so while plot summaries are somewhat more common, it is rather unusual to find first-person narratives in movie reviews. In general, product reviews, especially

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reviews of search goods, tend to be comprised of a mixture of descriptive, evaluative and narrative modes of discourse. The analysis of reviews of various products and services indicates that, predictably, narratives are more common in negative than positive reviews. In some cases, individuals use the review for activities other than their intended purpose; in these cases, it is possible that the sharing of their personal experiences may transcend, and be more personally meaningful, than simply providing an evaluation of a given product or service. Once again, this chapter has shown how individuals use the review site as a resource for achieving various goals, some of which align with the intended purpose and function of the review site, and others which subvert it. The digital narrative of personal experience is a resource that can enable reviewers to realize multiple objectives simultaneously. Furthermore, this analysis of narratives in online reviews offers insights into the wide range of reasons that individual choose to write reviews: to affirm their values, to make sense of their experience, to entertain, to be heard and perhaps most importantly, to reach out to, and connect with, others by sharing their personal stories.

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Summary and Conclusion

We are always amazed by the creativity of our customers (an Amazon ­spokesperson, quoted in a Wall Street Journal online article). In this chapter, I begin with an analysis of a single review, in which I tie together the major topics discussed in Chapters 2–5, before turning to a broader summary of the themes discussed throughout the book. I also point out some of the limitations of my approach, and I conclude by addressing a few ‘big picture’ issues related to online reviews. Throughout this chapter, I offer some thoughts about future directions for students and scholars interested in this topic.

Revisiting the major themes In the previous chapters of this book, I have explored some of the discursive resources used to express evaluation, to claim identities, to create involvement, to make intertextual references and to construct narratives in online reviews. Throughout each chapter, I have treated each of these topics separately and have provided an overview of the range of forms and features used by different reviewers. In this final chapter, in order to tie these themes together, I now offer an analysis of one review in which I demonstrate how these topics appear – and occasionally overlap with one another – within a single text. The text in 6.1 is an excerpt from a product review found on Amazon. In it, the reviewer offers a description and evaluation of a diaper bag that she recently purchased.

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6.1 I am the mother of 2 children and have many diaper bags. I have a large one for travel, small ones to go shopping with, etc. If you are a parent I am sure you can relate. I bought this for a friend that is having a baby soon. She did not register for one, and thought this looked like a pretty good bag to get her. I hated the fact that it did not have any reviews for it so far, but bought it anyway. I love reading reviews, but have never written one myself. This will be the first. Immediately in the first two sentences, the reviewer claims a number of social identities. Specifically, she begins her review by positioning herself in terms of her family role and relationships (mother of two children), as well as in terms of the type of consumer that she is (i.e., an owner of multiple diaper bags, each one with a designated purpose), which, when taken together, indicates a certain level of expertise related to this type of product. In the third sentence – that is, If you are a parent I am sure you can relate – she involves her readers through the repeated use of second-person reference. Here, in addressing other parents directly, the reviewer creates a sense of solidarity or co-membership and establishes common ground with a specific group of potential readers of her review. Starting with the fourth sentence, the predominant focus of the review shifts from establishing the reviewer’s identity and creating rapport with other parents to providing the background (i.e., the orientation) of a narrative. In the orientation segment that opens the narrative, the reviewer explains who she bought the bag for (a friend that is having a baby soon) as well as why she chose this particular product (She did not register for one . . . thought this looked like a pretty good bag to get her.) After providing the background context for her purchase, the emphasis of the text shifts once more, as the reviewer draws attention to the larger genre of online reviews, in explaining her reluctance to purchase the product because of its lack of reviews (I hated the fact that it did not have any reviews for it so far, but bought it anyway). As mentioned in Chapter  5, evaluation is a pervasive feature of narratives, so it is not surprising that evaluation appears as the reviewer describes her first impression of the product (looked like a pretty good bag) as well as her own reaction to the lack of online reviews for the product (I hated the fact that it did not have any reviews). The intertextual focus on the importance of other reviews for this particular review writer continues, as she explains that she is not only an avid reader of reviews (I love reading reviews) but also as she claims the situated identity of a novice reviewer (have never written one myself. This will be the first).

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As the text continues (in  6.2), the reviewer moves away from past-tense narration (This bag has definitely exceeded my expectations) to a present-tense description of its features. 6.2 This bag has definitely exceeded my expectations. It is a medium size bag. I love that it is more tall than wide. It won’t get hung up when you go down a narrow isle. It has two pouch pockets on the front that you can see in the picture, behind that is a zipper pocket that holds 4 bottles (the bottle holders are made of one strip of elastic, so if you don’t use bottles you can use if for something else). . . . The main thing I love about this bag is that the main compartment opens real wide. I hate having a jammed packed diaper bag. When you want to get something out, everything on top falls out with it. This one opens real wide to prevent that problem. Anyway, I definitely love this diaper bag. I just got 2 new ones for Christmas, so I do not feel right buying another one just yet, but if and when I have another child, I will definitely buy this one if it is available. In this segment of the review, the reviewer continues to use a number of secondperson address forms as an involvement strategy: It won’t get hung up when you go down a narrow isle, so if you don’t use bottles you can use if for something else), When you want to get something out, everything on top falls out with it. She uses this particular involvement strategy repeatedly to directly address the reader(s) of her review. Co-occurring with one of these second-person address forms is an intertextual reference to an image of the product that can be seen on the website: It has two pouch pockets on the front that you can see in the picture. Finally, in terms of evaluating the product, the reviewer references her own prior expectations in the first sentence of 6.2. In addition, there are 3 instances of the stance adverb, definitely (underlined in excerpt 6.2), as well as a future orientation to eventually purchasing this product again in the future (i.e., this time for herself). All of these evaluative devices (i.e., expectations, definitely and a future orientation) were discussed in Chapter 2. In this review, we can see that the reviewer does a considerable amount of identity work, in that she constructs herself as having some relevant experience, being a mother of two children, and having owned other versions of the type of product reviewed. Furthermore, we are also told something about her consuming practices, that is, she uses different diaper bags for different occasions. Yet, at the

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same time, she is not an extravagant consumer, since she explains near the end of the review that purchasing a third diaper bag for herself at this point in time is unwarranted. Finally, in terms of situated identities, she positions herself both as a reader of online reviews and as a first-time reviewer. All of this identity information contributes to the construction of a credible self. As a first-time reviewer, she is trustworthy, and we can also identify with her: especially the majority of us who read reviews but do not post reviews ourselves. Moreover, she writes from a position of some authority or expertise on the topic. This expertise is both stated explicitly (as a mother and user of this type of product) and is also inferable from the thorough description of the product. From the reviewer’s detailed description (which includes a discussion of possible problems and alternative uses of some product features), it is evident that she has a first-hand understanding of various features of the product and that she can compare them to other designs made by the brand’s competitors. Indeed, it could be argued that it is especially important for this reviewer to position herself as credible – that is, someone who knows what she is talking about, as well as someone who is trustworthy – since, in this case, her review is based on a product purchased as a gift, rather than based on her own personal use. (Although her own personal experiences with other diaper bags clearly inform her discussion of the product she is reviewing.) The reviewer’s expert identity makes it possible for her to evaluate the product from a number of perspectives. First, she explains that she made the decision to purchase this product on the basis of its appearance and in spite of its lack of reviews by other consumers. In describing the product, she approves of its dimensions and shape (I love that it is more tall than wide) as well as its feature of having a wide opening. Her expertise on the subject of diaper bags is further evident in how she envisions possible scenarios: she is able to predict what will not happen with this product (i.e., won’t get hung up when you go down a narrow aisle) and she is able to come up with an alternate use for a product feature, thereby repurposing it (i.e., bottle holders are made of one strip of elastic, so if you don’t use bottles you can use it for something else). Some of her other observations are presumably based on her own past experiences (i.e., everything on top falling out from a full bag that does not open wide enough). In this text, evaluation is realized linguistically in a number of different ways. For example, she uses verbs of affect, love and hate, in explaining what she likes and dislikes about this and similar products. She also repeatedly emphasizes her commitment, with the adverb definitely, to her past-present-and-future-oriented claims: this diaper

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bag has definitely exceeded her expectations, she definitely loves it and she will definitely purchase one for herself if she has a third child. While there are only few examples of intertextuality in this review, the few that appear serve important functions. First, by stating that she loves to read reviews written by others, she positions herself not just as a casual reader but as an avid reader of reviews. Next, her intertextual reference to the lack of other reviews for the product provides the rationale for a new behaviour: writing a review herself. Finally, her third intertextual reference – to the photo of the product on the website (i.e., . . . that you can see in the picture) – could have been accomplished by using an impersonal construction (e.g., as can be seen in the picture, as is shown in the picture, as in the picture, etc.); however, it is noteworthy that she uses second-person pronominal address form, you. In this instance, as the reviewer’s linguistic choices link together the author, her audience and a shared multimodal text (i.e., the online photo), we can clearly see how mutually supporting involvement and intertextuality can be in this genre of online discourse, as was discussed in Chapter 4. The narrative elements in this particular text, in a sense, ‘book-end’ the review. The reviewer begins by narrating the circumstances of her decision to purchase the product – including not only who it was for, and why she chose this particular product, but also her own response, and reaction, to the lack of available online reviews about it. The final paragraph has a resolution and coda type of structure, as the reviewer explains why she cannot buy one for herself now, and as she commits to purchasing one in the future, if appropriate. Not surprisingly, evaluation is interwoven into the narrative portions of this text. Within narratives, evaluation is the structural element that encodes narrators’ point of view, and often in these expressions evaluation, we are able to gain additional insights into the kind of person the narrative claims to be (Cortazzi and Jin  2000). Thus, narrative can be viewed as a discursive tool or resource for projecting a particular type of identity – in online reviews, just as in other narrative contexts. What I have hoped to illustrate through this final example of analysis is the way in which several of the themes discussed earlier not only appear together in a single text, but also how, in some cases, they seem to reinforce or support one another. For example, there are overlaps between how she evaluates and her identities. Similarly, making an intertextual reference can be regarded as a form of involvement in that it offers a type of common ground between the reviewer and the audience.

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Summary Throughout the pages of this book, I have illustrated how the phenomena of evaluation, identity, involvement, intertextuality and narrative occur in reviews found on all of the five websites. In other words, each of these phenomena can and do appear in any type of review, not only reviews associated with a particular product or service. However, at the same time, in highlighting how a particular website’s constraints and affordances are related to the discourse that appears on different sites, I have also pointed out particular features that tend to be more site-specific. Some examples of this site-specificity include the absence of the evaluative feature ‘justification of star category’ on websites TripAdvisor and Epicurious (where bubbles and forks are used respectively), as well as finding an example of a ‘threaded discussion’ occurring in review texts on sites such as Epicurious, but not on reviews on the Amazon site (perhaps because Amazon provides a separate space for users to comment on individual reviews). Throughout the previous chapters, I have made an effort to complement the quantification of relevant features (which illustrate some broader trends and patterns across the data) with more in-depth, qualitative, analytic interpretation of textual examples. These in-depth analyses serve to support the quantification of overall trends, highlighting overall tendencies occurring across the dataset and shedding light on how particular features function together within the context of a specific review(s). Whenever possible, I have also tried to make connections between my own findings and research on reviews from other fields of study. At times this has been challenging, given that the discourses of other fields are not always compatible with one another, nor are they necessarily compatible with my own particular interest in the actual language that appears in online reviews.1 Nevertheless, I feel that, whenever possible, it is important to break out of disciplinary isolation and to at least try to connect my own scholarship with other, ongoing conversations in progress, which centre on the topic of online reviews. My goal has been to explore the common patterns found in online reviews as well as to document some of the more remarkable instances of reviewers’ creativity. In other words, alongside a primary focus on those features that are common, typical and likely to occur across different review texts, I have also endeavoured to show here ‘that which is possible’ to find in online reviews. This includes the identification and discussion of occasional ‘off-topic’ posts, which orient to other concerns, issues or questions that some authors may have. I view

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these off-topic posts – that is, those that deviate from the primary function of the site (i.e., to evaluate a specified product or service) – as a form of authorial agency, of individuals using the site for their own needs and purposes, to express what is personally relevant or meaningful to them. I believe that these examples are particularly interesting to consider, especially since these more unusual forms of personal expression are typically ignored by researchers of online reviews working in other disciplines (e.g., marketing, economics, communication). I have been impressed by those online authors who repurpose or appropriate the space of the review text for their own purposes (often subverting the website’s intentions), who carve out spaces for expressing what they choose to express and who engage in interactions that are important and meaningful for them.2 Initially, as a user of online content, I was drawn to online reviews for their informational potential. For example, TripAdvisor afforded me the opportunity to read multiple first-person accounts of a particular hotel in London or Atlanta that I was considering staying at, written by individuals who had recently stayed there themselves. However, as I began reading more and more reviews (and eventually even studying them systematically), I quickly realized that reviews can offer us more than just information: Some are actually quite entertaining. This potential for online reviews to be simultaneously informative and entertaining has clearly been exploited by Yelp, the site who asks its users to rate reviews not only as ‘useful’, but also as ‘funny’ and ‘cool’. Thus, it may be useful to consider reviews from these two dimensions – as potentially informative as well as potentially entertaining. While the diaper bag review discussed earlier in this chapter might be characterized as more informational than entertaining, the haiku text discussed in Chapter 3 might be considered more entertaining than informative. And, of course, some reviews provide a balance of both of these characteristics, like the sushi restaurant narrative discussed in Chapter 5, for example. Interestingly, this ‘entertainment’ potential of online reviews can be also found elsewhere online. One example is a set of 20 YouTube videos featuring professional actors performing dramatic readings of Yelp restaurant reviews (‘Real Actors Read Yelp’: http://www.youtube.com/user/gottakidtofeed). In this space, the information potential of online reviews is clearly superseded by their entertainment value. Another example of the entertainment function of reviews is a set of over 700 reviews written in response to a (presumably) parodic recipe for making ice, found on the website food.com (http://www. food.com/recipe/ice-cubes-420398). As reviewers engage in the playful activity

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of writing an obviously fake review for a fake recipe (Consider the following example: I harvest my own free-range water, so the idea of putting it in a plastic tray and a commercially-made electricity wasting freezer disgusts me . . .), the primary function of such reviews for both the author and the audience is clearly one of entertainment. A recent article in the popular media (Phillips 2013) also discussed the growing phenomenon of ‘funny’ product reviews on Amazon. In fact, considering that it is possible to find parodies of online reviews underscores exactly how well established this genre of reviews has become. These parodies also demonstrate that writers have intuitively come to recognize many of the discursive conventions of the wider genre of the online reviews (such as identifying oneself in terms of lifestyle categories, as in the above example), as well as some of the more site-specific practices that are typical of particular review communities.

Limitations and future directions Studying any online phenomenon is like trying to capture a rapidly moving subject in a still photograph. As is true of all digital genres, the conventions, affordances and larger trends associated with online reviews are continuously changing. Therefore, while I have tried to offer a synchronic snapshot of the language of online reviews, I am keenly aware that some of the information offered here will have changed by the time this book appears in print. Nevertheless, I hope that this work will provide a record of this genre as it exists today, and that, as a descriptive account, it may serve as a useful document for future comparisons, as the genre of online reviews inevitably continues to evolve over time. Related to this issue, it is important to point out that I have included some quantification of features when I thought that this might be helpful to understand broader trends; however, I have also tried to be cautious in not making too many generalizations on the basis of these tendencies. Considering that currently billions of consumer reviews are available online, a corpus of 1,000 reviews is a very small drop in a very large bucket. (Although, at the same time, I have no reason to assume that my data are not representative of review texts in general. On the contrary, each time I read a new review, I am struck by how frequently narrative structures are used, or how similar the identity categories discussed here are invoked or how often the stance adverb literally appears, etc.) Because the conventions and norms of this genre are in a constant

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state of change, this means that any quantification can only reveal trends that are present at a particular point in time. For instance, an early account of online reviews found that intertextual references were very rare (Pollach 2006). In contrast, I found a wide range of intertextual forms and the most common were references to the other reviews. It makes sense that this characteristic would change over the past decade, as more and more reviews posted online has come to mean that there are more and more prior reviews for new reviewers to draw upon and refer to in their own commentaries. One issue that I have not addressed here is that of multiple modalities. For many of us, the majority of our online interactions remain primarily text based; however, as the relevant technologies change, we are likely to see more use of visual images and video available online. Of course, this means that multiple modalities are also being incorporated into online reviews. In the 5 years that I have been studying online reviews, I have witnessed a gradual increase in the posting of photographs, especially for restaurant and hotel reviews. Also, Amazon now includes an option for reviewers to post video reviews. As more and more people post and view reviews from their mobile devices, we can expect to see continued and increasing use of multimodal evidence to support a review text. Analysts who study the discourse of online reviews in the future will perhaps wish to consider ways in which semiotic systems associated with these other forms of communication actually support, contribute to, and connect with, textbased reviews. Researchers in the area of genre studies have talked about how texts exist within a web of other texts sometimes called ‘genre networks, genre chains, genre sets or repertoires of genres’ (Paltridge 2012, p. 68). In Chapter 4, I discussed certain forms of intertextuality, or the ways in which review texts referred to other types of texts. However, I did not include any discussion of how reviews are situated and connected to other related genres such as follow-up comments to reviews, or other forms of discourse found on the review site. I made this decision deliberately in order to restrict the scope of the book and to make this topic manageable from an analytic standpoint. For example, I chose not to include an analysis of other genres such as follow-up comments to reviews found on Amazon, because while such comments are clearly a related genre, comments ultimately represent a genre that is different from reviews. Responses to reviews (either by other consumers or by businesses) are fascinating texts in and of themselves, and such related genres represent rich areas for further exploration. Certainly, these types of texts have the potential to tell us a great

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deal about different audiences’ responses to reviews, and it would, therefore, be very useful in the future to study the relationships between reviews and the comments that follow them. Responding to another trend in genre studies, it might also be interesting to combine the future analysis of discourse with more ethnographic approaches. Over the period of time that I have spent writing this book, I have amassed pages of anecdotal reports from review users, review writers as well as business owners. Each time someone asked me about my research, I took the opportunity to ask them about their own experiences with online reviews. I have kept a log with notes about these conversations, which have sometimes provided me with fresh insights and different perspectives on my data. However, I recognize that it would be useful to approach more systematically the collection of introspective data with both review users and review writers. For example, while there are some studies from the field of communication that examine the features of reviews that readers attend to, most of these are controlled experiments, rather than investigations of actual consumer behaviour. A complementary perspective could be to develop a protocol for observing individuals as they read reviews, perhaps combined with introspective reports about which features of reviews they are attending to and which they find most useful in their decision-making. It might also be illuminating, for example, to interview actual writers of reviews (as Kuehn 2011, has done). Another area that merits closer attention is that of e-politeness and impoliteness in online reviews. For instance, although I have touched on some involvement strategies that may contribute to the discursive construction of solidarity between reviewers and readers, there may be other forms of relational work which merit closer analysis. A related topic is how community norms for communication evolve on particular review sites. In terms of face work, the modes of discourse on review sites can generally be described as polite, or ‘politic’ (Locher and Watts 2005), in that I found very few instances of faceattack, or reviewers explicitly insulting their audience. However, it is possible that some reviewers who take up controversial or contentious or contrarian stances may be engaged in ‘trolling’ (Hardaker 2010). Again, it would be interesting for future research to take up closer analyses of e-politeness, e-impoliteness and how these relate to community norms established on particular sites. Finally, I believe that future research should also consider reviews written in languages other than English. In my sampling of 1,000 reviews from 5 different

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websites, I only came across 4 reviews written in languages other than English (Italian, Spanish and Japanese). Several of the websites in my sample are now international, though most are based in the United States. However, there are many other online review sites serving different geographical contexts and readerships. Future studies could examine reviews written for different global audiences. Such analyses could provide insights into cross-cultural differences that appear in review texts as well as information about how reviewing as a social practice differs according to the local context in which it is produced.

Some larger issues As an applied linguist, I tend to constrain my analyses to the actual language that appears in my data. However, it is undeniable that online reviews are textual manifestations of what are actually larger social practices, embedded in broader, socio-historically specific material activities. In this section, I address several issues that are tangentially related to my work. These are issues that are inevitably linked to online reviews, even if they have not been central to my own mission here of describing the discourse features of online reviews.

Authenticity and authentication Perhaps the number one question that I am typically asked has to do with the issue of authenticity. In fact, whenever I lecture publicly or speak informally about this topic, the question of fraudulent reviews inevitably arises: ‘Aren’t a lot of these reviews fake?’ Of course, I believe that we must remain sceptical, cautious and critical about everything we read online (not only user-generated texts, but also texts written by ‘experts’). I also believe that we must learn to trust our instincts: if something is telling us what we are reading is a fake review, then it may well be. However, at the same time, I also believe that a few review-related scandals are not representative of the billions of reviews that are currently available online. More specifically, in my study of 1,000 online reviews here, less than 1 per cent have the characteristics associated with fraudulent reviews (e.g., a review written by a reviewer who has posted no other reviews on the site; vague and underelaborated descriptions of the product or service, especially when coupled with extremely high or extremely low ratings).3 Beyond trusting our instincts and our common sense in determining which

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reviews are trustworthy and which are not, we can also turn to ‘the wisdom of the crowds’ in our processes of interpretation. Is it only a handful of reviews that is reporting on a negative experience, compared to hundreds of glowing reviews about the same product? Are the negative claims being made based on unreasonable expectations? Are the reviews extremely generic and vague, and unaccompanied by detailed accounts that convince us of a first-hand experience? As I have suggested elsewhere (Vásquez 2014), many of us are probably already asking ourselves similar questions as we engage in complex ‘filtering processes’ to determine the personal relevance and applicability of the reviews that we read. Yet, many users of online reviews remain sceptical about the ostensibly ‘unbiased’ nature of user-generated content. The more we can be sure that the author of a review is writing from his/her genuine, direct experience – as opposed to being motivated to write a review for profit (or some other potential gains) – the more likely we will be to trust what we read. Closely related to this central question of authenticity (i.e., Is this a ‘real’ review written by an ‘unbiased’ reviewer?) are matters related to authentication. Elsewhere in the book I have mentioned some sites’ exploitation of pre-configurations of credibility, such as Yelp’s GPS-based ‘check in’ feature, and Amazon’s ‘Verified Purchase’ and ‘Real Name’ badges, which rely on triangulating reviewer identities with credit card information. Clearly, these methods of authenticating a reviewer’s identity allow review sites to make strong claims regarding the high quality of their content. Consequently, one current trend is for review sites to continue to find new ways to verify the authenticity of the reviewer. Besides some of the badges, and check-in functions, review sites can also screen content that gets posted and ‘filter’ and/ or remove any content that they suspect of being biased or fraudulent. For example, Yelp relies on a robust review filter, to detect potentially fraudulent, or otherwise problematic, reviews. Another development in this area is the growth of applications that enable users to login to one online site, and from there, to experience ‘online presence integration’ across a number of other sites (Briggs 2010, p. 49). This is what happens, for instance, when an individual who is logged in on Facebook opens a new window for TripAdvisor and is then immediately ‘recognized’ by TripAdvisor from their Facebook profile. These newer modes of authenticating identities function by reducing anonymity online. It has been predicted that these types of online interconnections ‘will encourage and empower users to bring consistency to their online persona’ and that, in time, they will ‘blur the line between the digital and real worlds’ (Briggs 2010, pp. 49, 53). How exactly this will impact consumer reviews remains to be seen.

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The distribution of expertise and consumer empowerment The rise and ubiquity of online reviews is associated with the distribution and, as some have argued, the democratization, of expertise. Online reviews have the potential to empower consumers who read them, in the sense that we no longer have to rely on a handful of other-designated experts to write books or magazine articles telling us about which films are worth viewing, which restaurants are worth visiting and which hotels are worth staying at. In addition, online reviews are also linked to consumer empowerment from the point of view of review writing as a digital practice. For the first time in history, consumers are able to give voice to their experiences in a very public way, via a mass-distributed platform. This is new. Published reviews have been around for a long time, and so has word of mouth; however, this new ability for any consumer to publicly share his/her experiences and reactions to a product or service and to reach a wide, global, interested audience is a digital practice for which there is no precise analogue precedent. Not surprisingly, some have decried this new technological affordance, especially the owners of small business who feel that their livelihood is now under threat anytime that a disgruntled customer feels like ranting about their experience in an online review forum. Indeed, small business owners may be especially vulnerable, since they, unlike larger corporations, rarely have the resources to staff ‘social media’ departments with individuals who spend their days engaged in various forms of ‘online reputation management’. There is no doubt that reviews are making an impact on consumer decision-making, as well as on businesses’ bottom lines, and that impact may be both positive and negative. As one popular marketing writer explains, ‘Under the old rules if you upset a customer we were all told to expect that they would tell seven of their friends’; in contrast, one upset customer today ‘could potentially impact your business negatively in front of hundreds or even thousands of prospects’ (Cockrum 2011, p. 2). For this reason, the field of ‘online reputation management’ has taken off in recent years. New businesses have arisen whose main purpose is to monitor the user-generated content posted online about the companies who hire them and to engage in various forms of ‘damage control’ in response to negative or untruthful commentary (Gruber 2011). And as the number of online reviews continues to grow, we are now seeing more and more businesses availing themselves of online opportunities to respond to those reviews (O’Connor 2010).

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Implications for education and educators While the primary aim of this book has been to describe the discourse features of this text type, I am often asked by colleagues in professional settings if there are any teaching implications that we can derive from this work. My answer to this question is ‘Most definitely.’ Online review texts can be used in many types of classrooms to foster critical thinking, to learn how to reconcile differing sets of opinions or perspectives and to understand the role that discourse plays in these processes. Even before the advent and spread of user-generated content, being able to question authorial motivations, to analyse texts and to understand the role of language in persuasion and evaluation were key processes to reading any type of text critically and have traditionally been central to curricula which stress critical thinking. These same skills apply to social media texts. However, I would also add that with the proliferation of user-generated content, these skills are perhaps even more important now than before. This is due to three fundamental differences between online reviews and earlier forms of reviews: scale, scope and the distribution of expertise. By scale, I mean that with online review texts (as well as user-generated content more generally), there are now millions more opinions available to us than what we could access in the past when we relied only on traditional word of mouth, or on a handful of opinions from experts. In other words, there are now more opinions available to us than ever before, and we will need to figure out how to make sense of all of this information. With respect to scope, the opinions are no longer restricted to a subset of places, products and services. Instead, we can now find opinions, reports or reviews about a hotel or restaurant in the remotest village in a country half-way around the world from us, or about a very obscure documentary film that would never have found its way into a mainstream print publication. This would seem to be a good thing in general, that is, the ability to access more information about a widerthan-ever-before range of products and services. However, this too can result in ‘information overload’, which may mean that there is some role for ‘digital curation’ (Synder, in press) where reviews are concerned. Finally, much has been written about the distribution (and ‘democratization’) of expertise. Rather than being restricted to a handful of elite reviewers (e.g., professional travel writers, food critics, celebrity film reviewers), reviews can now be written by anyone about anything. This means that anyone with an internet connection and an opinion can claim to be an ‘expert’. Once again, this characteristic has both advantages and drawbacks: we now have access to a multitude of different

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perspectives (not just those of a professional cadre of reviewers). However, it could also be argued that user-generated content means that there are as many uninformed opinions as valid ones that can be found online. Teaching students how to discern between useful, quality online content (and that which is less useful and less relevant) is a skill that should continue to be cultivated by educators at all levels, whose mission encompasses digital literacies. Regardless of what our own personal beliefs, practices and relationships with online reviews happens to be, the digital landscape that most of us inhabit on a daily basis is populated with billions of these types of texts. And their power and impact is undeniable. Ever since I began my research on the language of online reviews over 5 years ago, every person whom I have spoken with about the topic  – individuals from many countries around the world – admitted to having read, used or written online reviews at one point in time or another. As long as they remain a genre that most people interact with, it is in our own interest to better understand the discourse of online reviews.

190

Notes Chapter 2 1 The GloWbE corpus is comprised of online language representing 20 varieties of Global English. The corpus is comprised of a variety of text types, which are classified into two broad categories: blogs and ‘general’. A cursory exploration of the corpus indicates that the ‘general’ category includes texts from online review sites, such as TripAdvisor and Amazon. However, the exact proportion of online reviews to other text types in the ‘general’ category is currently unknown, and, at this point, it is not possible to sort or to search the corpus specifically for review data (Mark Davies, personal communication, April 2013). 2 Some research has reported on the overall tendency for reviews to be positive rather than negative. For example, Hu et al. (2009) describe a ‘J-shaped distribution’ for most reviews, wherein the majority of reviews cluster around the positive end of the scale, very few appear in the middle of the distribution, with a slight increase at the negative end. Interestingly, Kuehn’s (2011) interviews with several Yelp reviewers indicated that they were concerned about appearing ‘too negative’ in their reviews – and they ‘often worried that something they wrote might negatively impact their position in the community, employment prospects or their reputation in the workplace’ (p. 209), which reveals some interesting tensions between online and offline identities and practices. 3 Typically, negative reviews are not to be categorically negative: usually, they also include some type of concession (Vásquez 2011). 4 To do this, I used the frequencies reported in Biber et al. (1999), and I normed for equivalence adverb data from my own data set to the reported frequencies. Therefore, both sets of raw numbers were normed to one million (and rounded to the nearest hundred) for comparability. (More information about norming corpus data can be found in the Appendix of Biber et al. 1998.) 5 Another interesting difference between speech and online reviews can be seen in comparing epistemic markers of imprecision, such as sort of and kind of. These are over four times as frequent in conversation as they are in reviews. Comparatively then, more assertions of certainty and fewer markers of imprecision can be found in online reviews when compared with casual conversation. Such linguistic variation across registers is to be expected, since each register has different communicative purposes as well as different production circumstances associated

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Notes with it. For example, as Biber and Conrad (2000) point out, adverbial markers of imprecision are frequently found in face-to-face conversations, because of the ‘lack of time for planning or revision which makes precise word choice difficult’ (p. 65). However, these same constraints clearly do not operate in asynchronous CMC where reviewers are able to plan what they want to say and to take all the time they want or need as they craft their review.

Chapter 3 1 Of course, the same labels could also refer to same-sex partners. 2 Communication scholars Willemsen et al. (2012) observed what they call an ‘ironic effect’, which is that ‘a self-proclaimed expert (vs. layperson) will increase perceived expertise, which then induces a more positive attitude towards the review, but simultaneously lower[s] perceived trustworth[iness], which induces a less positive attitude towards the review. When operating together, these opposing indirect effects are likely to cancel each other out, thereby producing a nonsignificant effect of source identification on attitude towards the online review’ (p. 19). This effect is also known as ‘suppression’. 3 This is borne out by anecdotal data I have collected during the writing of this book. Of the individuals who spoke with me, many more described themselves as users of reviews and not writers of reviews. 4 Similarly, Amazon also rewards its productive, ‘verified’ reviewers by inviting them to be ‘Vine’ members, which means that they are sometimes sent free items to review. 5 Although all sites require membership to post reviews, Netflix represents more of a closed community, in the sense that users must be subscribers to Netflix in order to be able to view reviews on the site. 6 I was unable to find information on the blog about when Netflix decided to remove author-identifying information from reviews. 7 The phenomenon of an individual ‘signing’ one’s name to a review as one would sign a letter is not unique to this site. I also observed this on both TripAdvisor and Amazon, sites that do allow reviewers to personalize their profiles.

Chapter 4 1 As mentioned in Chapter 3, Netflix represents an exception, since Netflix reviews are not attached to any author-identifying information. On this site then, a signature would be the only means through which a reviewer could self-identify.

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2 Some review sites, like TripAdvisor and Yelp, provide spaces for businesses to respond to consumer reviews. In my earliest TripAdvisor dataset (2008), I found that only 1 of 100 complaints received a response from a hotel staff member. In contrast, in the 200 hotel reviews that I collected 3 years later (2011), hotel representatives had become much more responsive to online reviews. In total, 13 of 100 negative reviews received follow-up comments from hotel personnel, and even 2 of the 100 positive reviews included responses from hotels. It is clear that businesses have started paying closer attention to their online ‘reputation management’: an indication of the influence of these forms of communication. Because the focus of this book is restricted to the review texts themselves, a more detailed analysis of such comments and responses to reviews (a related, though separate, genre of texts) is beyond my current scope here. However, this is certainly a fascinating area in which further research is needed. For example, what rhetorical strategies do company representatives use as they respond to critiques of their products? What types of consumer critiques seem to prompt the most responses from businesses? How do other reviewers respond to specific types of claims? Topics such as these are likely to generate much future research. 3 Some scholars further distinguish ‘genre-mixing’ as a related, though distinct, phenomenon and call it ‘interdiscursivity.’ 4 http://www.haikumoviereviews.com/, http://reviewinhaiku.com/, https://twitter. com/HaikuReviewer, https://en-gb.facebook.com/HaikuReviewer. 5 The case is similar on Netflix, where reviewers refer to a text that is provided by the context – that is, the multimedia text of the film being reviewed. 6 It is unclear whether A and B’s comments are ‘legitimate’ reviews or whether their posts can be considered a form of ‘trolling’ (Hardaker 2010), intended to incite debate or provoke reactions from other members of the community.

Chapter 5 1 This was calculated from the age given on the reviewer’s Yelp profile. 2 As mentioned previously, Pinch and Kesler noted a similar trend in their (2011) survey of prolific Amazon reviewers.

Chapter 6 1 Some readers might expect that, as a linguist, I would be interested in issues related to standard language, correct spelling, etc. However, other analysts (Pollach, Otterbacher, Mackiewicz) have attended to these issues already. My own

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interests have more to do with describing and exploring the linguistic and rhetorical creativity that is demonstrated by reviewers, within what is considered by many to be a relatively mundane and unremarkable genre. 2 In a similar vein, Carmen Lee (2011) has documented some ways in which Facebook users sometimes choose to ignore the technical constraints of the platform and instead to engage with it on their own terms. 3 Some websites now offer internet users tips about ‘how to spot fake online product reviews’ – e.g., http://www.realsimple.com/work-life/life-strategies/fake-onlinereviews-00100000090957/index.html.

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Index adjectives in online reviews  32 see also good, in online reviews Amazon  6–7, 10–12, 32, 42, 53, 71, 79, 88, 90–1, 121, 129, 145, 155, 165, 175, 180, 182–3, 186, 191n. 1, 192nn. 4, 6 AntConc  35 assessments see discourse-level evaluation strategies Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)  19–20 astroturfing  6 attitude adverbs  39, 41, 43 see also specific entries audiences, addressing  112–14 authenticity  6, 20–2, 185–6 bottom-up approaches see discourse analysis business perspective, online reviews from  2 cline of narrativity see narrative(s) computer-mediated communication (CMC)  3, 98, 110–11 concordance lines  28, 32 in online reviews definitely  39–41, 43, 177–9 literally  39, 43, 182 unfortunately  39, 41–2, 118 in recipe/restaurant reviews for back  37, 40 for definitely and again  36, 40 for delicious  34 for good  33 for guests  49 for just  35 for reviews  48, 128 for very good  35 consumer empowerment  187

consumer good reviews see Amazon consumer taste categories see lifestyle and taste categories conventional speech act  106 conversation features  108–10 simulating  110–12 credibility, pre-configurations of  88–9 see also positioning, by website declarative present-tense statements  47–8 definitely (stance adverbs)  39–41, 43, 177–9 dialogues, imagined  110–12 digital narratives, of personal experience  137 cline of narrativity  137, 140–1 exceptional narratives  149 film reviews  149–54 restaurant reviews  154–61 narrative variation  141 hotel reviews  141–4 recipe reviews  145–9 Ochs and Capps’ narrative dimensions  161 product reviews  165–72 sociolinguistic research, on narrative  138–40 discourse analysis bottom-up approaches  28 evaluation in  25–8, 55 top-down approaches  28, 55 discourse analytic approach(es), adoption of  21 discourse features, of online reviews authenticity and authentication  185–6 consumer empowerment  187 education and educators, implications for  188–9 expertise, distribution of  187

206

Index

discourse-level evaluation strategies  44 assessments  48–52 declarative present-tense statements  47–8 interjections  46–7 rhetorical questions  47 slang, usage of  44–6 star rating, justification of  52–5 discourse markers, and conversational features  108–10 discursive construction, of reviewer identities  57 identities invoked in single text  81–6 personal information, within review text  60 lifestyle and taste categories  67–71 situated identities  71–81 traditional membership categories  60–7 readers, reviewer identity information for  86–7 website, positioning by  87 credibility, pre-configurations of  88–9 profile section  90–4 user IDs  89–90 economic impact, of online reviews  2 education and educators, implications for  188–9 electronic-word-of-mouth (eWOM) definition  3 vs. traditional word of mouth  3 elite reviewer  88–9, 188 see also reviewer(s) embeddedness, in online reviews  139, 161–2, 165, 168, 171 Epicurious  7, 15–16, 32, 51–2, 54, 75, 89–90, 92, 127–9, 145, 148–9, 180 Epinions  13 epistemic adverbs  39, 41, 43 see also specific entries ethics  19–20 evaluation in discourse  25–8, 55 explicit forms  28 implicit forms  28, 55 lexicogrammatical resources  29–32 in narratives  140

stance  26 strategies (see discourse-level evaluation strategies) evaluative adjectives  22, 31–3 exceptional narratives  149 film reviews  149–54 restaurant reviews  154–61 see also narrative(s) experience goods vs. search goods  10–12, 17 expertise distribution  187 explicit construction  71–5 implicit construction  75–8 Facebook  4, 89, 120, 124, 139, 154, 186, 194n. 2 face-to-face narratives  162–3, 171 film reviews  12–13, 149–54 see also Netflix first-person plural pronouns  104–6 first-time reviewers see novice reviewers frequent reviewers  80 future directions, of online reviews  182–5 Ghose, A.  150 GloWbE corpus  29–31, 191n. 1 good, in online reviews  32–5, 44, 71 see also concordance lines hotel reviews  8–10, 165, 183 definitely and again/back, concordance lines for  40 narrative from abstract  142, 144 coda  144 complicating action  141–2, 144 evaluation  142–3 orientation  142, 144 resolution  144 see also narrative(s) see also TripAdvisor I am Love  13 identity(ies) inscribed  58, 82 invoked  58, 66, 78, 81–6 non-expert  78–9 regional  82

Index reviewer information  59, 86–7 see also discursive construction, of reviewer identities situated (see situated identities) transportable  58, 82 imagined dialogues see dialogues, imagined IMDB  12 imperatives  103–4 implicit construction, of expertise  75–8 Inception  13 inscribed identities see identity(ies) interactivity, in online reviews  97 intertextuality  97, 114, 129–35 direct address to reviewers  116–19 in Epicurious  127–9 intertextual relationships with other genres  124–7 specific reviewer(s)  119–21 textual sources and discourse systems  122–4 website  121–2 involvement  98–9 audiences, addressing  112–14 conventional speech act  106 discourse markers, and conversational features  108–10 first-person plural pronouns  104–6 imagined dialogues  110–12 imperatives  103–4 questions, posing of  106–8 second-person pronouns  99–103 interjections  46–7 internet, consumer reviews on  1, 3 intertextuality  97, 114, 129–35, 179 direct address to reviewers  116–19 in Epicurious  127–9 intertextual relationships with other genres  124–7 specific reviewer(s)  119–21 textual sources and discourse systems  122–4 website  121–2 involvement, in online reviews  98–9 audiences, addressing  112–14 conventional speech act  106 discourse markers, and conversational features  108–10

207

first-person plural pronouns  104–6 imagined dialogues  110–12 imperatives  103–4 questions, posing of  106–8 second-person pronouns  99–103 spoken discourse  98 written discourse  98 Ipeirotis, P.  150 ironic effect  192n. 2 Johnstone, B.  110 J-shaped distribution  191n. 2 Klausner, Harriet  121 Kozinets, Robert  19 Labov, W.  138 lexical chunks  35–9 lexicogrammatical resources, and evaluation  29–32 lifestyle and taste categories  67–71 limitations and future directions, of online reviews  182–5 linearity, in online reviews  139, 162, 170–1 literally (stance adverbs)  39, 43, 182 McGrane, H.  149 meh (predicative adjective)  44–5 methodological considerations, of online reviews authenticity  20–1 discourse analytic approach, adoption of  21 ethics  19–20 representativeness  18–19 micro-narratives  137, 148 see also digital narratives, of personal experience moral stance, in online reviews  139, 151, 162, 165–8, 170–1 motivations, for posting online reviews  5 narrative(s) canonical  142 cline of narrativity  137, 140–1 components  138 dimensions and possibilities  139 email  142

208

Index

in Epicurious reviews  145 and evaluation  140, 143 exceptional  149 film reviews  149–54 restaurant reviews  154–61 face-to-face  162–3, 171 Ochs and Capps’ narrative dimensions  161–72 sociolinguistic research on  138–40 variation  141 hotel reviews  141–4 recipe reviews  145–9 Netflix  7, 12–13, 32, 53, 89, 92–3, 105, 113, 120–1, 124, 149, 151–4, 165, 192nn. 1, 5–6 n-grams  36 non-complainers  81 non-expert identity, construction of  78–9 novice reviewers  79–80 Ochs and Capps’ narrative dimensions  161–72 online customer reviews, definition of  2 ‘online reputation management’  187 online review writers  4–7 Page, Ruth  58, 154 peer-ratings system  88 personal information, within review text  60 lifestyle and taste categories  67–71 situated identities  71 explicit construction, of expertise  71–5 frequent reviewers  80 implicit construction, of expertise  75–8 non-complainers  81 non-expert identity, construction of  78–9 novice reviewers  79–80 traditional membership categories  60–7 Pew Internet & American Life Project  4 Pimpadelic  13 positioning, by website  87 credibility, pre-configurations of  88–9 profile section  90–4 user IDs  89–90

posting online reviews see motivations, for posting online reviews product reviews  165–72 profile section, on review site  90–4 see also positioning, by website prosumer(s)  4 questions, posing of  106–8 ‘Rants and Raves’  9 reader(s) addressing first-person plural pronouns  104– 6 second-person pronouns  99–103 reviewer identity information for  86–7 recipe reviews concordance lines for definitely and again  36, 40 for delicious  33–4 for good  33 for guests  49 for just as intensifier  34–5 for reviews  48, 128 for very good  34–5 narrative from abstract  147 coda  146, 148 complicating action  146–8 evaluation  145–9 orientation  145–8 resolution  146, 148 see also narrative(s) see also Epicurious representativeness  18–19 restaurant reviews  13–15, 154–61, 164–5, 183 concordance lines for back  37, 40 for delicious  33–4 for good  33 for just as intensifier  34–5 for meh  45 for very good  34–5 see also Yelp review(s) concordance lines for literally  43 for unfortunately  42

Index consumer good  10–12 film  12–13, 149–54 hotel  8–10, 141–4 product  165–72 recipe  145–9 restaurant (see restaurant reviews) review text, personal information within  60 lifestyle and taste categories  67–71 situated identities  71 explicit construction, of expertise  71–5 frequent reviewers  80 implicit construction, of expertise  75–8 non-complainers  81 non-expert identity, construction of  78–9 novice reviewers  79–80 traditional membership categories  60–7 reviewer(s) direct address to  116–19 elite  88–9, 188 frequent  80 identity(ies) information  86–7 and online reviews  3 situated (see situated identities) see also reviewer identities, discursive construction of novice  79–80 profile  90–4 specific  119–21 user IDs  89–90 reviewer identities, discursive construction of  57 identities invoked in single text  81–6 personal information, within review text  60 lifestyle and taste categories  67–71 situated identities  71–81 traditional membership categories  60–7 readers, reviewer identity information for  86–7 website, positioning by  87 credibility, pre-configurations of  88–9

209

profile section  90–4 user IDs  89–90 rhetorical questions  47 search goods vs. experience goods  10–12, 17 second-person pronouns  99–103 Shalit, Gene  120 Shallow Hal  13 single text, identities invoked in  81–6 see also identity(ies) situated identities  58, 71, 82 explicit construction, of expertise  71–5 frequent reviewers  80 implicit construction, of expertise  75–8 non-complainers  81 non-expert identity, construction of  78–9 novice reviewers  79–80 see also identity(ies) slang, usage of  44–6 social media, role in  3–4 sociolinguistic research, on narrative  138–40 spatio-temporal adverbs  38, 55 see also specific entries stance adverbs  22, 31, 37, 39–43, 118, 177–9, 182 see also specific entries star rating, justification of  52–5 style adverbs  39, 41, 43 see also specific entries suppression effect  192n. 2 tellability  139, 146, 161, 163, 167–8, 170–1 tellership  139, 161, 163, 165–6, 168, 171 textual sources and discourse systems  122–4 Toffler, Alvin  4 top-down approaches see discourse analysis traditional demographic categories age  60–1, 65–6 gender  60–2 passim, 65–7 passim occupational/education status  60–1, 63–4, 67 race  60–1, 65–6

210 regional/national background  60–1, 63 relationship/family status  60–5 passim, 67 religion  60–1, 65–6 sexual orientation  61, 63, 65–6 traditional word of mouth vs. electronicword-of-mouth  3 transportable identities  58, 82 see also identity(ies) TripAdvisor  3, 7–10, 31–2, 40, 54–5, 73–4, 79, 81, 87, 89–90, 92, 102, 112, 122, 129–30, 145, 180–1, 186, 191n. 1, 192n. 6, 193n. 2 Twitter  4, 44, 115, 124, 139 Tying the Knot  13 unfortunately (stance adverbs)  39, 41–2, 118 user IDs, of reviewer’s  89–90 see also positioning, by website valence shifters  26, 32–3 variation, in narratives see narrative(s)

Index Waletzky, J.  138 website(s) adjectives in online reviews  32 positioning by  87 credibility, pre-configurations of  88–9 profile section  90–4 user IDs  89–90 reference to  121–2 and reviews  7 Amazon (see Amazon) differences  16–17 Epicurious (see Epicurious) Netflix (see Netflix) similarities  16 TripAdvisor (see TripAdvisor) Yelp (see Yelp) Wikipedia  122–3 Yelp  7, 13–15, 32, 44–5, 51–2, 63–4, 80, 88–9, 91–2, 113, 121–2, 125, 154, 157, 161, 181, 186, 191n. 2, 193n. 2 YouTube  4, 122, 167–8, 181