The email's subject line asked, “Guess
how many people have seen your reviews?”I was surprised to learn
the total now stands at 10,632. Not bad for about 60 short-paragraph
pieces I've typically written in less than ten minutes.
It's been unpaid work, but I gain the
satisfaction of helping others by writing reviews of restaurants,
hotels, and attractions for the travel website TripAdvisor.
I check the site's reviews whenever I
plan a trip, so contributing my assessments and an occasional photo
enables me to offer some payback. And it's a great writing exercise
to reflect on the highs and lows of an experience, then boil it to
one or two paragraphs.
So far my most popular review, with
1,142 readers, was of the Motel 6 in Springfield, Illinois, where I
stayed while driving from the Indianapolis Christian Writers
Conference to the HACWN conference in Kansas City. And my “most
helpful review” was last summer's assessment of Zapata Falls near
Great Sand Dunes National Park.
 |
| In reviewing the Studebaker National Museum, I advised visitors not to miss the cars stacked two-deep in visible storage in the basement. |
I'm surprised that 14 percent of my
readers live outside the United States,
with 9 percent from Germany
and 1 percent from India.
That's part of the beauty of reviews.
You never know who might be able to gain from what you've experienced
– and your skill in writing about it.
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