‘REVIEWESE’ RUN AMOK

A Weasel Word Writers Should Kill

It can be a red flag for editors — and with good reason

I had a standard test for aspiring critics when I edited the book section of a large newspaper. Send me links to your three best reviews, I’d say — one positive, one negative, and one mixed.

The reason? I wanted to see that freelancers could be fair in any kind of review: good, bad, or indifferent.

Some critics saw it as moral virtue to give only favorable reviews, even if an author hadn’t mastered English grammar or might have plagiarized — a deal-breaker at a paper whose readers expected critics to fault those sins.

Other freelancers were nasty to books they didn’t like, another weed-out factor. Reviews can be tough without being mean-spirited.

Still other critics had trouble finding the right balance of pros and cons in a mixed review and tipped their comments in a direction they didn’t intend.

Then there were the critics who committed none of those sins but still received no assignment. Their reviews were so fuzzy, I had no idea what they really thought of a book. Did they love or hate it, or shrug after finishing it? They came across as too timid to risk an honest opinion.

Why ‘compelling’ is a weasel word

I could often spot the too-tentative reviewers through their frequent use of the weasel word “compelling.” They would talk about a “compelling” book, theme, character, or almost anything else.

It sounded good, but what did it mean? “Compelling” typically was intended as praise, but some books “compel” you to put them down, or snort with derision.

More recently, the blight has migrated to blurbs, those snippets of advance praise on book covers that typically come from friends of the author, editor, or agent. It’s also infiltrated movie and TV reviews so widely so that it’s become a cliché, an example of the jargon known as “reviewese.”

Most critics who used the word “compelling,” I knew, weren’t trying to write badly. They were picking up on what they’d seen others say without thinking about what, if anything, it meant.

But writing teachers are right when they tell their students, “Every word must tell.” They’re also right to note its unwritten corollary, “Every word does tell.” Everything you say reveals something about you, your thought processes, and how you approach your writing.

Much as I agree with those writing teachers, I found it hard to explain to freelancers what was wrong with the word “compelling.”

As a book editor, I heard every week from dozens of freelancers who wanted to review for my newspaper. I had no time to explain to all of them what was wrong with their word choice, not when I was also receiving hundreds of review copies of books per week from publishers hoping for coverage.

But I learned of a brief, graceful way to deal with the problem when I attended an annual awards ceremony for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, one of the three most prestigious book prizes in the U.S.

The critic Daniel Mendelsohn was introducing that year’s lifetime-award winner, Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books and one of the most admired people in American literary criticism, who later received the National Humanities Medal.

Mendelsohn said that Silvers asked when a critic described a book as “compelling”:

“Compelling? Compelled to do what?”

Silvers died five years after that awards ceremony, but his spirit lives. Good editors still ask questions like his.

I’m no longer the book editor of a newspaper, but I teach writing, including book reviewing, and if a student handed in a paper that described a novel as “compelling,” I might write in the margins the same question Silvers asked his reviewers: “Compelling? Compelled to do what?”

@JaniceHarayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been a writer and editor for Glamour magazine, the book columnist for the largest newspaper in Ohio, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. She has written for many major media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Salon.

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