A review is usually written for an English-language magazine, newspaper or

website. The main purpose is to describe and express a personal opinion about
something which the writer has experienced (e.g. a film, a holiday, a product, a
website etc.) and to give the reader a clear impression of what the item
discussed is like. Description and explanation are key functions for this task,
and a review will normally include a recommendation to the reader.

from: Cambridge English First Handbook for Teachers

Reviews are included in Part 2 of your writing exam, which means that, unlike
essays, you can choose if you want to write a review or instead work on one of
the other options (article, report, letter/email, or story in FCE for Schools).

Writing reviews is fun!

OK OK, it might not be as much fun as, for example, going out with your friends
or spending a year travelling around the world, but compared to other writing
tasks in the FCE exam, such as essays, it definitely feels a little bit more casual
and easy-going. So, whenever I practise review writing in my classes my
students are surprisingly fine with it and I hope that you will feel confident as
well once you’ve finished reading this post.
First of all, for many students it is not fully clear what to expect from a review
task. Luckily, there are a lot of similarities between different reviews and you
can use this to your advantage. Prepare by studying these characteristics so
you can simply replicate them each and every time you sit down to write a
review.
We are going to have a look at the typical requirements, structure and other
little things you should include, leave out and/or be careful with, so let’s start by
having a look at an example task that could be part of your exam.

What a typical review task looks like

When we look at different review tasks we can see very quickly that there are
similarities between them which you can take advantage of whenever you sit
down to write. A typical example might look like the one below:
Typical example of an FCE review writing task
I always tell my students to check two things when looking at a writing
task: what to include and who is going to read their text. Read the task
carefully and underline the key parts. Below I have done all of that for you.

Check exactly what you have to include and who is going to read your review.
So, who is going to read the review? Because you are writing for an English-
language magazine their readers are going to be your audience. Why is this
important? In the FCE writing exam you are marked on your use of
appropriate language for each task, which includes the right register
(formal, neutral, informal). Choosing the wrong one can cost you marks so we
don’t want that to happen.
In our example we should choose a neutral to informal style as we are writing
for a magazine. Many different kinds of people will read your review so we don’t
want it to be too informal, but still keep it light and interesting.
There are also three main points that we have to include in the review: what
surprising thing the main character of the book did, why it was surprising and
whether or not you would recommend the book.
The good thing for your review writing, in general, is that there are always
three things that you have to include. These are usually a description
(What did the main character do?), a discussion (Why was it surprising?)
and a recommendation (Would you recommend the book to other
people?). You can normally look for these three things in every review and you
will see how similar all the different tasks are.

How to organise your review

Once you have analysed the task, it is time to organise your review. You might
already have guessed it, but there is a plan that you can follow every time
because the tasks are all very similar.

Looking back at our example task, there are three main ideas that we have to
deal with in our text:
1. What surprising thing did the main character do? (description)
2. Why was it surprising? (discussion)
3. Would you recommend the book to other people? (recommendation)
Of course, we can give each of these points a paragraph so our review already
has three. (Note that we could combine the first and second point into one
paragraph as they both talk about the actions of the main character.) Adding a
title an interesting introduction makes it four and we are ready to go. The
outline of our review (and every review, really) now looks like this:
1. Title and introduction
2. description (What did the main character do?)
3. discussion (Why was it surprising?)
4. recommendation (Would you recommend the book to other people?)
And just like that we have a universal plan for most review tasks in the
FCE writing exam.

Plan before you start writing

Just before we start looking at the four different parts of every good FCE review
I would like to remind you of one very important tool that a lot of students forget
about once they are sitting in the official exam. I’m talking about the importance
of making a plan before you even start writing.
Take three or four minutes to make a little map with the different
paragraphs and just two or three key words under each heading so you
know exactly what you want to include in your text. This way, you won’t
forget anything you want to write about and feel more relaxed once you actually
start putting your pen to paper.
The different parts of a review
In this part of the post we are going to look at the different sections of a review
using our example task so you know exactly what to expect and what to be
careful with. Obviously, you will have to adjust your language and vocabulary to
each specific task, but I will give you some general advice and expressions you
can always use.

Introduction

The main purpose of the introduction is to create interest so the reader wants to
find out what you have to say about the book, film, restaurant or whatever you
have to write about. You can use a few tricks to achieve that:
Firstly, start with a personalised question. This connects the reader to
your review and makes them want to continue reading, and secondly,
don’t give away the surprise but only give a little hint at it. This way, you
can create even more excitement.
With these things in mind, I wrote this example introduction for you:

11/22/63 – a review

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Most people would
probably meet their great-great-grandparents or watch how the amazing
pyramids in Giza were built, but Jake Epping, the main character of the novel
“11/22/63” by Stephen King finds himself in a completely unexpected situation
and he has to make a very difficult decision that will change history as we know
it.
As you can see, I followed my advice and started with a personalised question.
It makes the reader wonder what they would do if they were in the main
character’s situation. I also tease the surprising decision the main character
Jake has to make, but I don’t say what exactly it is.

If you like my introduction, which you should , try to follow this plan each
time you start a review. It guarantees excited readers, happy examiners and
high marks for you.

Description

The next point we’re going to talk about is the description portion of your review.
Here, you need to give some information based on your task. In our example
you have to say what surprising thing the main character did.
The best part about the description is that you don’t have to do anything special
– just answer the question and move on. Of course, there are some things
that (don’t) make sense to include so let’s go into a little bit more detail.
1. Stick to the question and don’t talk about unrelated things.
 2. Give some support to your answer (related details)
3. Use adjectives and adverbs to make it more interesting to read.
Jake, a teacher in a little town in Maine, finds a mysterious time portal in the
back of a ragged diner which takes him back to the year 1958. He soon realises
that every time he goes through the portal he gets to the exact same point in
the past. Eventually, he makes the unexpected decision to stop Lee Harvey
Oswald from brutally killing President John F. Kennedy on 22.11.1963.
In my paragraph I don’t talk about unrelated things, but only the details that are
necessary to understand how Jake gets to the point at which he makes his
surprising decision. I also included some descriptive adjectives and adverbs to
make my paragraph a little bit more interesting (mysterious, ragged, exact,
eventually, unexpected, brutally).
Follow my advice and don’t make it too complicated for yourself. Describe what
you have to describe and go to the next point.

Discussion

The next step is the discussion portion of your review. There is usually some
part in which you have to give your opinion in every review writing task (That’s
what discussion really means.) so it is really important to keep the following
things in mind:
1. Again, don’t write about things that are not in the task.
2. Use specific language to give your opinion
o In my opinion/view, …
o For me, …
o I think/believe/feel that …
o I would say that …
o It seems to me that …
In the example task you need to discuss why the main character’s action is
surprising so here is what I would write about my book “11/22/63”:
It seems to me that Jake could choose many other and more personal things to
do, but he decides to try and change history to a degree that he cannot predict.
I my opinion, that came definitely unexpected and if I were in his position I
probably wouldn’t even consider a task this far-reaching.
Once again, I followed my own advice to only answer the question and to use
specific language (it seems to me that, in my opinion). You see that it’s not that
complicated if you know what to do.

Recommendation
The last part of your review is usually a recommendation to your readers. As in
the previous to chapters you have to use specific language to please the
examiner and to make it clear to the reader that you are recommending
something.
1. Don’t mix up the recommendation with the other parts of your review.
2. Use specific language to give recommendations:
o I recommend/suggest [title/name] to + person
o I recommend/suggest + -ing
o I recommend/suggest that …
o You should + base verb
o You might want to + base verb
3. Write a final sentence to conclude the review.
My recommendation looks like this:
I definitely recommend “11/22/63” to everyone who has already read some of
Stephen King’s novels as well as to those who like stories with twists and turns
around every corner plus you get some modern history on top of that. For me, it
was absolutely worth reading and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
As you can see, I used specific language to give recommendations (I definitely
recommend) and concluded the review with a final sentence (…it was
absolutely worth it…).
If you put all four parts (introduction, description, discussion, recommendation)
together and follow the advice given in this post, your review will be a hit.

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