Review

REVIEW TEXT

DEFINITION AND EXAMPLE

Definition: it is a text that provides someone’s response or reaction, or evaluation to an art work (a book, film, play, and so on) by providing a description of the work and a judgment.

Social Function:

To critique an art work, event for a public audience. Such works of art include movies, TV shows, books, plays, operas, recordings, exhibitions, concerts, and ballets.

Generic Structure of a review text:

·     Orientation: places the work in its general and particular context, often by comparing it with others of its kind or through analogue with a non-art object or event.

·        Interpretive Recount summaries the plot and/or provides and account of how the reviewed rendition of the work came into being; is optional, but if present, of recursive.

·    Evaluation: provides an evaluation of the work and/or its performance or production; is usually recursive.

·    Evaluation Summation: provides a kind of punch line which sums up the reviewer’s opinion of the art event as a whole; is optional.

Significant Lexicogrammatical features:

·         Focus on Particular Participants.

·   Direct expression of options through use of Attitudinal Epithets in nominal groups; qualitative Attributes and Affective Mental Processes.

·         Use of elaborating and extending clause and group complexes to package the information.

·     Use of metaphorical language (e.g., The wit was there, dexterously ping ponged to and from …).

 EXAMPLE