It's stupid how fucking necessary this actually is.
Book reviews are not excuses to tell people you don't know that they're horrible and they suck, or excuses to kiss up to your friends and tell them how fucking perfect they are, wow, they so deserve an 11 out of 10 because they're obviously perfect human beings.
First of all, does anyone even know what the term unbiased fucking means?
It means looking at something from an objective standpoint. It means not lying and telling people they're perfect and everything they do is perfect just because they're your friends. Nobody is fucking perfect. Every story, every work, everything can use improvement, no matter who the person is.
On the flipside, you shouldn't be fucking giving people you're not friends with super low ratings because their grammar could use work or their cover isn't pretty enough or you don't like their plot, especially if you're overlooking those details for your friends. Treat every single person with the same amount of fucking respect and integrity. That's what a fucking good human being does.
It's perfectly alright to tell people that their grammar needs work, or their plot is overused, or they repeatedly make errors regarding capitalization or punctuation, but to tell them that their story is shit or it makes you want to die or that they, plainly-put, suck? That's a big fat fucking no in my book.
The purpose of book reviews is to offer constructive criticism, not harsh insults and biased flattery. And if you're simply giving a book a quick glance and saying, "This book needs work, your grammar is bad, fix it," then you're not even doing a book review, you're just giving a brief opinion. A review (a proper one) is meant to objectively tell the writer what they're doing wrong, what they're doing right, what they need to work on, and how to fucking work on it. It's like telling a baby deer, "Walk," shoving it onto a frozen lake, and expecting it to start doing graceful pirouettes and waltzing around without hesitation simply because you told it to.
No.
If you're going to tell someone that they need improvement somewhere, then at least explain exactly what needs improvement and how to fucking do it. Give them some sort of direction; otherwise, you're not helping them at all. If they have bad grammar, fucking tell them how to fix it. Don't just tell them what they're doing wrong if you're not going to tell them how to do it right.
This is exactly fucking why I put as much effort, thought, and consideration into my book reviews as possible. To try to help people effectively. That's the whole point of a review, in case you didn't know – to give constructive criticism. If you're not doing that, then you're not doing it right, and if you're not doing it right, or even close to right, then you shouldn't be doing it at all. Stick to just leaving comments on stories because that's essentially what you're doing. Don't call them book reviews when that's not even what they are.
