Evaluating a local business and writing up your assessment of the establishment in a review paper. Please do not review a movie, book, CD, or product for this assignment. Choose a place that offers a service to its customers, such as a restaurant, a retail store, or a public library.
A review always includes both the good and the bad aspects of the establishment and tells an audience what they can expect if they go there. Most reviews will also include examples of how the business measures up to its competition. When appropriate, you should include comparisons to other similar businesses in your review.
Please choose one of the following options for this paper (if you’d like to write a review about a business that’s not on this list, please e-mail your idea to me for approval):
restaurant (ideally, not a chain) library
coffee shop fitness or sports center
bowling alley hair salon tanning salon, nail salon
grocery store movie theater clothing store
auto repair shop retail store
**Note: Most students end up writing a restaurant review for this assignment, so most of my examples are about restaurants.
Introduction:
Your introduction should tell your reader where the establishment is located, what type of business the establishment falls under (retail shop, restaurant, etc…) and include a thesis statement. Your thesis statement needs to make an overall claim about the kind of experience one could have at your chosen place of business.
When writing a review, it is very important to establish clear criteria to use when judging an establishment. You will need to introduce these standards in your paper (in the introduction or thesis statement) and argue whether or not the establishment meets your standards of judgment.
Body:
Each of the individual points you are analyzing will need to be fully developed, with specific information, descriptions, examples, and possibly a comparison to another similar establishment. If you are writing a restaurant review, for instance, under the section for quality of food, you could include taste, temperature, presentation, overall food rating, and a brief comparison to a similar menu item at a competing restaurant.
Conclusion:
Your conclusion should address your reading audience. What do you want them to do with this information?
Notes:
1. Establish and apply clear criteria for judging the restaurant, coffee shop, etc.. What, exactly, will you be judging?
2. Separate your own emotional response from your job as a critic. You need to be objective in your review. You would not, for instance, want to say, “I always go to Atomic Coffee, and I love it; therefore, the coffee shop deserves the grade of “A.”
3. Give the establishment an overall grade (A, B, C, D, or F) and justify your rating. **You can be creative here (three out of four forks; nine out of ten bowling pins, etc…). The overall rating is found at the end of the paper (see #9, below)
4. Use engaging language to write your review. Use colorful adjectives and adverbs to describe elements of your review.
5. Include comparisons when appropriate. Remember, your audience has never been to the restaurant or coffee shop, so you should provide them with comparisons to places they are familiar with.
6. Please do not review a place where you have been (or currently are) employed. Remember, you will need to be objective when you write your review, and often, employees can’t be objective about the place where they work.
7. If you use the same language as found in the menu, enclose the borrowed words in quotation marks.
8. This paper needs to be written entirely by you. Do not access the internet for any ideas or phrases. Doing so is plagiarism.
9. Include all the pertinent information you would normally find in a review. You should place this information at the end of your essay:
address
hours of operation
phone number
method of payment accepted
dress (casual? formal?)
reservations needed?
overall rating
service rating
food rating depending on the topic, these
price aspects may change
Purpose: Your purpose in writing this review paper is to inform your audience about the kind of experience they could have at a local establishment. You can also convince them that they should or should not patronize the establishment you are reviewing.
Audience: Residents of your local community. You need to assume that your audience has never been to the establishment you are reviewing.
