Diana the Valkyrie's Story reviewer's Guide 
By Diana the Valkyrie
How to review a story


When you're reviewing a story, remember that the main question isn't how 
much you liked it (obviously your own enjoyment of the story is a 
factor), it's how much you think other people will like it. Explain the 
plotline (without giving away any surprises) and say how well you think 
the author wrote the story. 

If the grammar/spelling is obtrusively poor, by all means say so, but 
please don't cavil at the occasional spelling mistake. In particular, 
when the author's native language isn't the language they're writing in, 
you should say so, but don't expect perfection then. 

On the other hand, story reviewers can be expected to have an excellent
command of the language, so you should use a spelling checker!

Please make your reviews as ascii text, no more than 80n characters per 
line, with real line breaks. If you use Word, then that means Save-As 
Ms-Dos text with line breaks. 

The first line of your review should have the story title and author, the 
second line should have "Reviewed by yourname". I won't take anonymous 
reviews, but it's fine to use a pseudonym. The third line should be the 
complete URL address of the story on the web site. For example, 

Valkyrie at sea by Diana the Valkyrie
Reviewed by Warrior Poet 
http://www.TheValkyrie.com/stories/valkyrie/atsea01.txt 


Sandra will use all this information to build the menu for the reviews 
section. 


Somewhere in the review, you should give an overall rating of the story, 
based on all the factors you consider important. This should be on a 
scale of one to five. 

1 = readable 2 = fair 3 = good 4 = excellent 5 = Read this Now! 

If you review a story that is too poor to even be readable, and if I 
agree, then I think I'd rather just drop it, or send it back to the 
author for revision.