How to Outline to Efficiently Write a Review for a TV Show Episode
Outlining your TV show review before you write it is your best review writing strategy. By preceding your review by writing a simple, moderate, or complex outline consisting of key events in the TV show episode, you will know where you are going with your TV show episode review before you begin writing it.
An outline can be written quickly (one-to-five minutes) or it could take you up to twenty or thirty minutes, depending upon how complex you wish to make it. After completing your outline, when writing your TV show episode review, you won’t have to rack-your-brain for what to write about. It will be there, on paper or on-screen, in front of you.
Body Bullet Points
Write out the main points from the TV show episode (descriptive notes), that you want to talk about and analyze in your review. Jot them down into sparsely-worded bullet points, words, or phrases that bring up the key points in your mind from the TV show episode that you wish to explore, discuss, and review in your critique.
After that is done, build paragraphs around each of those moments, each of those points. Break each point apart and analyze it in those paragraphs. What made those points good, what made them bad, what made them memorable?
As you go through your newly created list, building your outline, and eventually begin writing your review, narrow this list down, combine items where possible.
As you do this more and more, these process will become automatic.
Writing the Review
I have written about writing reviews for a TV series (or Blu-ray), writing strategies, and 7 things to avoid when writing a review, so I will not go over that in this article.
When transforming your outline into a full review, remember:
The Opening – optional – The thesis statement where you give your overall thoughts on the TV show episode. You don’t have to do this. You can just go into the most important moment of the TV show episode that you want to talk about. If you have overall thoughts on the TV show episode, however, the opening of your review is where you should place it.
The Body – Complete all of your outline paragraphs, edit them, and decide in which order you want the paragraphs in your review to appear. The easiest order is sequential to the TV show episode but that is not always the best order for a review. As I mentioned in “The Opening,” you may want to begin your review with the most important part, in your opinion, of the TV show episode, the thing that hung above and beyond all other elements in the TV show episode in your mind.
The Closing – This can be a fixed ending – a per-determined ending to your review, what you had always intended to end your review with, what you intended to leave the reader with, or it can be an organic, the natural conclusion to the final paragraph of your review.
Different Review Structures Examples
This Penny Dreadful: Season 3, Episode 4: A Blade of Grass TV show review is representative of the end result of a structured outline and thought-process. It is, for the most part, sequential, but for a even larger part its the author (I’m the author) talking about the episode and its elements while comparing it to previous episodes in the TV series, other TV series, and films as well. This is what outlining does – it helps you to thoroughly think about the subject matter under review and all of the points of comparison and contrast that spring to mind. This Outlander: Season 4, Episode 8: Wilmington TV show review is an example of this as well.
For an example of a review distinctly broken up by separate sections, this Snowpiercer: Season 2, Episode 1: The Time of Two Engine TV show review serves as an example. In this review, you can literally see the skeleton of the outline in the review, especially in its sub-headings and how each section is defined by a single subject.
You can read here the differences between blending paragraph transitions vs. separate sections in review writing.
In Closing
Key-points to remember:
- Get your thoughts down on key moments from the episode on paper before writing your review
- Refine those thoughts into sentences then create paragraphs from those refined sentences
- Copy-edit your paragraphs, place them in the order that makes the most sense, and read through the finished review 5-7 times to catch any errors
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