A few pieces of advice:
-
Express an opinion. Your review should both tell your audience about the work you are reviewing and communicate your intellectual, emotional and visceral experience of it.
-
Back up your opinions with relevant and descriptive details from the work itself. The more specific you can be, the better.
-
Bring readers into the experience with you by using sensory images. Metaphors, similes, descriptive adjectives, strong verbs, vivid imagery that draws on all five senses — these are the difference between a good review and a great one.
-
Be mindful of your audience. You are writing a review for The New York Times, so your readers will include a broad cross-section of people. You’ll need to give appropriate context for those who might not be familiar with the work you’re reviewing. At the same time, be sure to take into account the creative work’s target audience. For example, if you are reviewing a video game intended for 10-year-old girls, aim to write a review that will be useful for 10-year-old girls (and their parents).
I’m not sure what to write about. Where should I start?
We suggest heading over to our step-by-step guide for writing a review, which walks you through the entire process from brainstorming a topic, to experiencing a work as a critic to finally putting your review on paper.
But to help you discover what strong opinions may be lying underneath that self-doubt, try responding to these writing prompts:
-
What New Work of Art or Culture Would You Recommend That Everyone Experience? (Coming soon)
-
What New Work of Art or Culture Would You Warn Others to Avoid? (Coming soon)
You say we have to review something that “debuted in 2023.” What does that mean?
That means that the work of art or culture you choose must be new this year. And yes, that applies to all of the categories of expression that we have listed above.
Why? Our contests have always challenged students to try to do what The New York Times does, and this requirement more closely aligns this contest with that goal. Reviews for The Times are on current works. They not only help readers decide what to read, watch, see or listen to now, but they also often play a significant role in shaping the cultural conversation around the works critics write about.
As A.O. Scott, a longtime arts critic, puts it, “Criticism is a kind of news reporting.” He writes of the role of a reviewer:
Whether or not we like the thing we’re reviewing, we are interested in what it means, how it works (or doesn’t), why it matters (or doesn’t), and how it reflects and is part of the larger world.
While we’re not asking you to race to your desk to type out a review for the next day’s paper like Times critics, we are asking that you choose to review something you think is worth talking about right now. We hope that, by writing about something current, you can more easily accomplish the task of justifying why a work “matters” and “how it reflects and is part of the larger world.”
And keep in mind that this doesn’t mean you only have to review today’s most popular works. As Mr. Scott writes, in addition to the “latest big Hollywood movies, Broadway shows, premium cable dramas, blockbuster museum retrospectives or whatever Jay-Z and Beyoncé are up to,” critics also “pay significant attention to small triumphs as well as grand ambitions, to interesting failures as well as astonishing successes.”
